Border states (American Civil War)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Border states of the American Civil War occupied a peculiar and fateful position: slave states that chose the Union over the Confederacy, at least officially. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri formed the original four, joined after 1863 by the newly created West Virginia. Together they held a fragile middle ground between two nations at war, their loyalties fractured along lines of family, economy, and geography.

  Lincoln put it plainly when he said, "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game." He also reportedly declared, "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky." The stakes were not rhetorical. If Maryland had joined the Confederacy, Washington would have been surrounded by enemy territory. If Missouri had gone south, the Union's grip on the Mississippi Valley would have been threatened at its roots.

  The men of these states fought on both sides. About 170,000 border state men, including African Americans, wore Union blue, and 86,000 wore Confederate grey. Sometimes brothers stood across from each other on the battlefield. These states were never simply loyal or disloyal. They were something more complicated, and their story sits at the very center of how the war was won and lost.

• 2. A Divided Economy

  ›

  Slavery in the border states was already fading by 1860, not from moral conviction but from economic pressure. In cities like Baltimore and St. Louis, rapid industrialization was pushing the old plantation model aside. The plantation economy of the border south was built around tobacco and hemp, not cotton, and the demand for slave labor in those crops was lower than in the Deep South.

  By 1860, more than half of the African Americans in Delaware were free. Maryland's free Black population was also substantial. According to the 1860 United States census, enslaved people made up less than a fifth of the population in every border state: Kentucky at 19.5 percent, Maryland at 12.7 percent, Missouri at 9.7 percent, West Virginia at 4.9 percent, and Delaware at just 1.6 percent.

  Some slaveholders responded to the declining local demand by selling surplus enslaved people to traders who transported them to cotton plantations in the Deep South. This human commerce connected border state economies to the Deep South even as the two regions diverged culturally. The border secessionists of 1861 were not primarily animated by slavery; their concern was federal coercion. They viewed Lincoln's call to arms as a repudiation of states' rights and constitutional government, not as a battle over bondage.

• 3. Maryland on the Edge

  ›

  On the 17th of September 1861, federal troops arrested without filing charges 27 members of the Maryland General Assembly, one-third of its total membership. They were held at Fort McHenry. The session was canceled outright because so many legislators were imprisoned.

  Maryland's strategic value was stark. Union troops had to pass through it to reach Washington, D.C. Virginia bordered the capital on another side, and if Maryland joined the Confederacy, Washington would have been encircled. Baltimore had deep ties to the Southern cotton trade, and popular Confederate sympathy ran strong there and on the Eastern Shore.

  Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and imprisoned a sitting U.S. congressman, along with Baltimore's mayor, police chief, and the entire Board of Police and city council. Chief Justice Roger Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, ruled on the 4th of June 1861, in Ex parte Merryman, that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. Lincoln ignored the ruling, citing national emergency.

  The Maryland Legislature had already rejected secession in the spring of 1861, though it refused to restore rail links with the North and requested Union troops leave the state. It did not want to secede, but it did not want to help kill Southern neighbors either. The song "Maryland, My Maryland" was written as a direct attack on Lincoln's actions against pro-Confederate elements in the state. By war's end, Maryland had contributed around 60,000 men to the Union Army and roughly 25,000 to the Confederate. In 1864, the state narrowly adopted a new constitution prohibiting slavery.

• 4. Kentucky's Neutrality Collapses

  ›

  Kentucky issued a neutrality proclamation on the 20th of May 1861, asking both sides to keep their armies out of the state. The Kentucky legislature passed two resolutions of neutrality and did not vote on any secession bill. Governor Beriah Magoffin, a Southern sympathizer, had already refused Lincoln's request for troops, saying Kentucky had no soldiers to furnish "for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States."

  That neutrality lasted only months. In the summer of 1861, Confederate General Leonidas Polk occupied Columbus, Kentucky. The legislature responded on September 7 with a resolution directing Magoffin to demand the Confederate evacuation. Magoffin vetoed it. The legislature overrode him, and Magoffin was forced to issue the proclamation anyway. The General Assembly then ordered the Union flag raised over the state capitol in Frankfort.

  A parallel Confederate government formed at the Russellville Convention, which met in Logan County on the 18th of November 1861, with 116 delegates from 68 counties. On the 10th of December 1861, Kentucky became the 13th state admitted to the Confederacy, represented by the central star on the Confederate battle flag. Bowling Green served as the Confederate capital and remained under Confederate control along with much of the state until General Grant moved through Kentucky in February 1862.

  In 1862, the Unionist legislature passed an act disenfranchising citizens who enlisted in the Confederate Army. By war's end, more than 70 percent of Kentucky's pre-war enslaved population had been freed through Union military measures or by escaping to Union lines. The state's last approximately 65,000 enslaved people, out of a pre-war total of 225,483, had to await the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 because Kentucky refused to ratify it.

• 5. Missouri's Guerrilla War

  ›

  The Camp Jackson Affair set Missouri on fire. Union Captain Nathaniel Lyon discovered that Governor Claiborne F. Jackson had been in secret correspondence with Confederate President Jefferson Davis, seeking artillery for the state militia, with the St. Louis Arsenal as the target. Lyon encircled the militia camp and forced its surrender. As his troops marched the prisoners to the arsenal, a deadly riot erupted in the streets.

  Jackson and his Confederate allies were driven from the state capital of Jefferson City on the 14th of June 1861. A reconvened Missouri Constitutional Convention declared state offices vacant on July 30 and appointed Hamilton Gamble as provisional governor, with Lincoln's immediate recognition. In exile, Jackson called the remnants of the legislature into session in Neosho on the 30th of October 1861, and they passed a secession ordinance. The Confederate Congress recognized it, and Missouri was admitted to the Confederacy on November 28.

  For the remainder of the war, Missouri became one of the most violent theaters of guerrilla conflict in North America. The partisans included William Quantrill, Frank and Jesse James, the Younger brothers, and William T. Anderson. On the 21st of August 1863, Quantrill's Raiders attacked Lawrence, Kansas, killing more than 150 civilians in retaliation for Union raids into Missouri. In response, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing issued General Order No. 11 on the 25th of August 1863, forcing the total evacuation of four counties near modern-day Kansas City. About 20,000 civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly men, had to abandon their homes. Many never returned.

  In September and October 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price raided Missouri with 12,000 men, coordinating with guerrillas. He was nearly trapped and escaped to Arkansas with roughly half his force after a decisive defeat at the Battle of Westport, now identified as the "Gettysburg of the West." Quantrill himself later moved to Kentucky, where he was ambushed and killed. Missouri abolished slavery in January 1865.

• 6. The Birth of West Virginia

  ›

  Western Virginia's break from Richmond had been building for decades. The Appalachian west was a world of subsistence farms and yeomen; it held few enslaved people. The plantation-owning east dominated state government, and western residents resented it. When the statewide Virginia secession vote came in, the results in what would become West Virginia told a different story: an estimated 34,677 voted against secession and 19,121 in favor, with 24 of the 50 counties voting for secession and 26 against.

  The Second Wheeling Convention opened on the 11th of June 1861, with more than 100 delegates from 32 counties, representing nearly one-third of Virginia's total voting population. They declared state offices vacant and chose Francis H. Pierpont as governor of Virginia on June 20. Pierpont's Restored Government granted permission for a new state on the 20th of August 1861. The statehood bill cleared Congress and was signed by Lincoln on the 31st of December 1862.

  In late spring 1861, Union troops from Ohio moved into western Virginia with a specific strategic goal: protecting the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. General George B. McClellan destroyed Confederate defenses in the region. Current estimates put soldiers from West Virginia at roughly 20,000-22,000 men on each side, making it the only Union-aligned state where soldiers were nearly equally divided between the two armies. It was also the only state containing counties that had formally voted to secede.

  West Virginia's admission in 1863 came with a condition: gradual emancipation. Children would be born free or freed as they came of age, and no new enslaved people could be brought in. About 6,000 people remained enslaved under this framework. West Virginia abolished slavery outright in February 1865, several months before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.

• 7. After the War

  ›

  Reconstruction, as directed by Congress, did not apply to the border states in the same way it applied to the eleven Confederate states, because the border states had never formally seceded. They still experienced Northern military occupation, political realignment, and the upheaval that came with amendments abolishing slavery and extending citizenship and voting rights to freed men.

  After 1880, most of these jurisdictions fell under the control of white Democrats who imposed Jim Crow segregation and second-class citizenship. Yet the border states diverged from the former Confederacy in one meaningful way: Black residents in the border states largely remained enfranchised, even through the disfranchisement movements of the 1900s. In most of the former Confederate states, nearly all Black voters were stripped of the franchise during the first half to two-thirds of the twentieth century.

  Delaware and Kentucky had been the most resistant to emancipation during the war, neither abolishing slavery nor ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 when it became law. The cultural geography these states defined outlasted the conflict itself. The Ohio River, which formed part of the border between free and slave territory, is still considered an important boundary between the cultural North and South. Both Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were born in Kentucky, Lincoln going on to reside in Illinois and Davis in Mississippi on the eve of the war that would define both their lives.