Border States (American Civil War) - Background

Background

In the Border states, slavery was systematically dying out in the urban areas and the regions without cotton, especially in cities that were rapidly industrializing, such as Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis. However, there was still profit to be made by selling slaves to the cotton plantations in the deep South, as cotton was very profitable and the price of prime field hands kept rising. In contrast to the unanimity of the seven cotton states in the lower South, the border slave states were bitterly divided about secession and were not eager to leave the Union. Border Unionists hoped that some compromise would be reached and they assumed that Lincoln would not send an army. Border secessionists paid less attention to the slavery issue in 1861; their states' economies were based more on trade with the North than on cotton and they lacked the South Carolinian dream of a slave-based empire oriented south toward the Caribbean. Rather their main focus in 1861 was on coercion: Lincoln's call to arms seemed a repudiation of the American traditions of states rights, democracy, liberty, and a republican form of government. The disunionists insisted that Washington had usurped illegitimate powers in defiance of the Constitution, and thereby had lost its legitimacy. After Lincoln called for troops, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina promptly declared their secessions and joined the Confederacy, but a secession movement began in western Virginia to break away and remain in the Union.

Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, with much stronger ties to the North than to the South, were deeply divided; Kentucky tried to proclaim itself neutral. Union military forces were used to guarantee these states remained in the Union. The western counties of Virginia rejected secession, set up a loyal government of Virginia (with representation in the U.S. Congress), and created the new state of West Virginia.