Slave states - definition of Slave states by The Free Dictionary Slave states - definition of Slave states by The Free Dictionary slave state n. 1. Slave State Any of the 15 states of the Union in which slavery was legal before the Civil War, including Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. 2. A nation under totalitarian rule. Slave State n (Historical Terms) history US any of the 15 Southern states in which slavery was legal until the Civil War Slave′ State` any of the 15 Southern states that permitted slavery before the Civil War. [1800–10, Amer.] Noun 1. slave state - any of the southern states in which slavery was legal prior to the American Civil War American state - one of the 50 states of the United States Confederacy , Confederate States , Confederate States of America , Dixie , Dixieland , South - the southern states that seceded from the United States in 1861 free state - any state prohibiting slavery prior to the American Civil War Want to thank TFD for its existence?

Tell a friend about us , add a link to this page, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content . Link to this page: References in classic literature ? Why, public opinion in the slave States IS slavery, is it not? These cases did not ALL occur, it will be seen, in territory actually belonging to legalised Slave States, though most, and those the very worst among them did, as their counterparts constantly do; but the position of the scenes of action in reference to places immediately at hand, where slavery is the law; and the strong resemblance between that class of outrages and the rest; lead to the just presumption that the character of the parties concerned was formed in slave districts, and brutalised by slave customs. View in context It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her -- the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

View in context It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. View in context The flag of the Confederate States unified the slave states of America; it flew over armies dedicated to ensuring that the ownership of another human being was a right; that the colour of a person's skin meant they could be bought and sold, whipped into toiling in cotton fields; hung for looking too hard or long at a white person. Lincoln's Campaign Biographies Forget the rose-tinted view that was presented in films such as Gone With The Wind, 12 Years A Slave depicts - with harrowing realism - exactly what it was like for thousands of people who were deprived of their liberty in the American slave states.

Brilliance from the brutality; It's a bleak tale of suffering at the heart of the American slave trade..but Brit director Steve McQueen's must-see movie is a masterpiece Not only this that the world mistakenly viewed the UN to be the liberator of slavery and inequality, but also the populations blindly trusted in its manifesto and purported mission designed and fabricated by the very brains and hands of the nations that would look for perpetuating their supremacy and domination over the rest of the world through this exploitative global platform; as a result, the slave-minded third world relied on the words delivered from the mouths of their former master states, and fell into deep sleep of negligence and ignorance without having least concerns and worries with regards to the statutes the Veto powers had articulated as the first and final draft while deciding the fate of the slave states for the future decades to go. Timeline: The Abolition of the Slave Trade By Andrea Curry It had been decades since the first mention of the issue in Parliament. In 1791, 163 Members of the Commons had voted against abolition. Very few MPs dared to defend the trade on moral grounds, even in the early debates. Instead, they called attention to the many economic and political reasons to continue it.

Those who profited from the trade made up a large vested interest, and everyone knew that an end to the slave trade also jeopardized the entire plantation system. “The property of the West Indians is at stake,” said one MP, “and, though men may be generous with their own property, they should not be so with the property of others.” Abolition of the British trade could also give France an economic and naval advantage. Before the parliamentary debates, Englishmen like John Locke, Daniel Defoe, John Wesley and Samuel Johnson had already spoken against slavery and the trade. In a stuffy party at Oxford, Dr. Johnson once offered the toast, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies.’’ Amid such scattered protests, the Quakers were the first group to organize and take action against slavery. Those on both sides of the Atlantic faced expulsion from the Society if they still owned slaves in 1776. In 1783 the British Quakers established the antislavery committee that played a huge role in abolition. The committee began by distributing pamphlets on the trade to both Parliament and the public.

Research became an important aspect of the abolitionist strategy, and Thomas Clarkson’s investigations on slave ships and in the trade’s chief cities provided ammunition for abolition’s leading parliamentary advocate, William Wilberforce. Mockingly—and sometimes respectfully others called Wilberforce and his friends “the Saints,” for their Evangeli- cal faith and championing of humanitarian causes. The Saints worked to humanize the penal code, advance popular education, improve conditions for laborers and reform the “manners” or morals of England. Abolition, however, was the “first object” of Wilberforce’s life, and he pursued it both in season and out. May 12, 1789, was clearly out of season for abolition. Sixty members of the West Indian lobby were present, and the trade’s supporters had already called abolition a “mad, wild, fanatical scheme of enthusiasts.” Wilberforce spoke for more than three hours. Although the House ended by adjourning the matter, the Times reported that both sides thought Wilberforce’s speech was one of the best that Parliament had ever heard. Wilberforce had concluded with a solemn moral charge: “The nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us.

We can no longer plead ignorance.” Having failed to obtain a final vote, the abolitionists redoubled their efforts to lay open the facts of the trade before the British people. So far, the public had easily ignored what it could not see, and there had been no slaves in England since 1772. English people saw slave ships loading and unloading only goods, never people. Few knew anything of the horrors of the middle passage from Africa. Over time, it became more and more difficult for anyone to plead ignorance of this matter. William Cowper’s poem “The Negro’s Complaint” circulated widely and was set to music. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, by an African man named Ottabah Cugoano, also became popular reading. Thomas Clarkson and others toured the country and helped to establish local antislavery committees. These committees in turn held frequent public meetings, campaigned for a boycott of West Indian sugar in favor of East and circulated petitions. When, in 1792, Wilberforce again gave notice of a motion, 499 petitions poured in. Although few MPs favored immediate abolition, this public outcry was hard to ignore.

An amendment inserting the word “gradual” into the abolition motion eventually carried the day. While in theory a victory of conscience, the bill as it then stood came to nothing. The abolitionist cause endured disappointments and delays each year following until 1804; and each year, British ships continued to carry tens of thousands of Africans into slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Anxiety about the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution contributed to Parliament’s conservative, gradualist decision in 1792; and the next year brought war with France. Wartime England lost her fervor for the cause. Although Wilberforce stubbornly brought his motion in Parliament each year until 1801, only two very small measures on behalf of the oppressed Africans succeeded in the first decade of the war. Respect for Wilberforce and his ilk turned to annoyance, and many seconded James Boswell’s sentiments: Go W— with narrow skull, Go home and preach away at Hull… Mischief to trade sits on your lip. Insects will gnaw the noblest ship. Go W—, begone, for shame, Thou dwarf with big resounding name. The state of affairs in France also brought abolitionist ideals under suspicion.

One earl thundered: “What does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less in effect, than liberty and equality? What more or less than the rights of man? And what is liberty and equality; and what are the rights of man, but the foolish fundamental principles of this new philosophy?” Even so, after more than a decade, the war with France began to lose its sense of urgency, however much the future of the world might—and did—hang in the balance. Slowly, public opinion began to reawaken and assert itself against the trade. Conditions in Parliament also became more favorable. Economic hardship and competition with promising new colonies weakened the position of the old West Indians. In 1806 abolitionists in Parliament managed to secure the West Indian vote on a bill that destroyed the three-quarters of the trade that was not with the West Indies. This bill, though in the West Indians’ competitive interest, also did much to pave the way for the 1807 decision.

On the night of the decisive 283-16 vote for total abolition of the trade in 1807, the House of Commons stood and cheered for the persistent Wilberforce, who for his part hung his head and wept. The bill became law on March 25, and was effective as of January 1, 1808. At home after the great vote, Wilberforce called gleefully to his friend Henry Thornton, “Well, Henry, what shall we abolish next?” Thornton replied, “The lottery, I think!”—but the more obvious answer was the institution of slavery itself. For the next century, England fought diplomatic battles on many fronts to reduce the foreign slave trade. British smugglers were stopped in their tracks by the 1811 decision that made slaving punishable by deportation to Botany Bay. Smuggling under various flags threatened to continue the Atlantic trade after other nations had abolished it, and the British African Squadron patrolled the West African coast until after the American Civil War. In 1833 slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

This radical break was possible partly through an “apprenticeship” system, and a settlement to the planters amounting to 40 percent of the government’s yearly income. The news reached Wilberforce two days before his death. “Thank God that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give 20 millions Sterling for the abolition of slavery,” he said. Some time before, Wilberforce had said, “that such a system should so long have been suffered to exist in any part of the British Empire will seem to our posterity almost incredible.” He was right. It is bittersweet, 200 years later, to commemorate the end of one of the most atrocious crimes in history. Yet the dismantling of an immensely profitable and iniquitous system, over a relatively short period of time and in spite of many obstacles, is certainly something to commemorate. This article by Andrea Curry was originally published in the May 2007 issue of British Heritage Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to British Heritage magazine today!

Why Cotton Became King Why Cotton Got To Be King By Robert Behre More than two decades before the Civil War, a planter in Edgefield, South Carolina, contemplated the languishing cotton prices and the plummeting value of his slaves—which by some accounts were worth less than a third of their value before the Panic of 1837. “Every day, I look forward to the future with more anxiety,” James Henry Hammond confided to his diary in 1841. “Cotton is falling, falling never to rise again.” But his fortunes did improve, and Hammond earned the admiration of influential South Carolinians, who eventually sent him to the U.S. Senate—where, during an 1858 debate with William Seward of New York, Hammond argued the South’s agricultural riches could bring the world to its feet in event of war with the North. “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?” Hammond asked. “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, you dare not make war on cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it.

Cotton is King.” But if your image of the South’s plantation economy is a refined, agrarian ideal that changed little in two-and-a-half centuries, before the loathsome Yankees put an end to it, well, that moonlight and magnolias picture isn’t quite right. In fact, the only constant in the South’s plantation economy was change—as reflected in the way Hammond’s fortunes varied over those 17 years. The South’s crops evolved—from tobacco and indigo to rice and sugar and then, only relatively late in the game, to cotton. The lands being farmed evolved—from coastal plains linked by rivers and bays, to interior regions connected by rail and canals. The states with the most promising crops evolved—from the old Atlantic seaboard states of the Carolinas and Virginia, west and south to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and eastern Texas. And the labor evolved—from a situation where enslaved blacks and whites essentially were both pioneers struggling to eke out an existence in a new world, to a system of chattel slavery in which the slaves were as much an asset as the land.

As England struggled for its own foothold in the New World, one of the few surviving settlers from the London Company planted a powerful seed around 1612 in what is now Virginia’s coastal plain. The tobacco John Rolfe planted wasn’t the harsh strain grown by the natives, but a milder seed that Spanish colonists were growing in the Caribbean and South America. Bad relations with the American Indians had plagued the colonists, who were struggling simply to keep themselves fed—much less earn the riches they had hoped to earn in this new land. Rolfe’s seed would change all that. When the first of Rolfe’s new tobacco crop was sold in London, the essential framework of the Southern plantation economy was put in place. The building blocks included colonists and planters eager for riches, seeds of crops from other places, a wealthy European market and a complicated gumbo of human relations that would breed both invention and cruelty. Rolfe found good ways to grow and cure the Spanish tobacco, possibly with advice from his new bride, Pocahontas. Seven years after Rolfe first planted his tobacco, Jamestown had exported 10 tons of it to Europe. This luxury crop eventually gave colonists needed income to buy African slaves.

The tobacco not only increased the colonists’ wealth, but the crown got its cut as well—a steady stream of income as the plant grew in popularity in London and beyond. At times, the colony had to force its residents to plant food. Within three decades, Jamestown was shipping 750 tons of tobacco back across the Atlantic, making tobacco the largest export in the American colonies. But the crop wore out the soil, so there was a scramble across the Chesapeake Bay waterways for fresh, suitable lands. England’s foothold was now secure, nonetheless, as the South learned that great prosperity could be gained through the cultivation of the right cash crop. The story of Southern agriculture isn’t confined to the South. Not only were European markets essential; precedents in the Caribbean colonies influenced its development. French and Spanish colonists established sugar plantations on several islands, and English colonists got in on the action in Barbados. By the 1640s, the small island was divided into large plantations. To do the demanding work, colonists imported African slaves in such numbers that there were three for every one planter, as wealthy planters eclipsed the poorer ones, some of whom would leave for a new colony called Carolina.

As the Virginia colonists were establishing wealth with tobacco, another English ship came ashore farther South in 1670 to create a new colony that eventually would surpass Virginia in cultivation of cash crops. The ship Carolina arrived via Barbados, and unlike the first settlers in Virginia, the colonists arrived with African slaves, though they were more like indentured servants. The Barbadian notion that a white planter considered all persons in his household as family helped shape the colony’s early slavery practices. In his definitive history of South Carolina, author Walter Edgar writes, “Everyone, white and black, was a pioneer.” The colonists tried tobacco first, without much luck—partly because the European market was saturated, forcing prices down. But by 1685, the Carolina colonists found a different crop that made many of them fortunes a few decades later: rice. The slaves’ knowledge of growing rice in their native Africa is increasingly understood to be an important part of the rice crop’s success. South Carolina planters valued slaves from rice-growing regions; Henry Laurens, a merchant slave trader and one of the wealthiest men in all of the American colonies, distinguished between slaves based on skills they learned in their native lands.

“The Slaves from the River Gambia are preferred to all others with us, save the Gold Coast,” he would write. “Gold Coast or Gambia are best…next to them the Windward Coast are prefer’d to Angolas.” The kind of wealth Lowcountry planters could amass is illustrated by the case of Peter Manigault, a planter, lawyer and legislator, born in 1731, who eventually held a 1,300-acre plantation west of Charles Towne, a 2,476-acre plantation in Port Royal and more than 2,000 acres of rice plantations along the Santee River, and another working plantation outside Columbia. His son Gabriel would inherit about 25,000 acres, enough wealth to allow him to pursue architecture and design some of Charleston’s most imposing buildings at the dawn of the 19th century. There was always a scramble for the next big crop. Eliza Lucas Pinckney of Charles Towne loved to experiment with crops—including indigo, a blue dye now commonly used for jeans but created a rare and valuable color in the 18th century; so valuable England was willing to subsidize its production.

The indigo market—and subsidy—effectively ended with the Revolutionary War, but rice would survive and find lucrative markets in Europe. After all, people can do without smoke or blue-colored garments, but everyone needs to eat. In Louisiana, French and Spanish settlers had moderate success with sugar, but indigo also was the major crop there in the late 18th century, before the region was part of the United States. The balance started to shift after a French nobleman, Etienne de Bore, returned to his native Louisiana. At his plantation about six miles north of New Orleans, de Bore became frustrated by insects gobbling up his indigo, so he began tinkering with sugar cane and in 1795, pioneered production of granulated sugar. He was helped by the expertise of other sugar makers who moved to Louisiana after the bloody 1791 slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. At the peak in the early 19th century, Louisiana planters got yields from 16 to 20 tons of cane per acre and harvested 300,000 tons of sugar per year, helping support half a million people.

Had a South Carolinian kept his promise in 1793 to pay a Yale-educated tutor 100 guineas a year, the Southern economy as most know it today might have looked a whole lot different. But the deal fell through, and Eli Whitney headed south to Savannah instead, accepting an offer from the widow of Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene to stay at her plantation and continue his studies. A handful of planters produced cotton in Georgia, but extracting the valuable lint from the worthless seed was a time-consuming chore that could easily wipe away any meaningful profit. Greene’s plantation manager, Phineas Miller—also a Yale alumnus—was familiar with the difficulties of processing cotton. At their urging, Whitney concocted a series of wires to hold the seed while a drum with hook-shaped wires pulled the fiber out and a rotating brush cleaned the lint off the hooks. Cotton was by no means a new crop: Planters had grown Sea Island cotton, a long-staple variety, in the sandy soils along the South Carolina and Georgia coast since the early 1700s. But like tobacco, it depleted the soil and often was challenging to market.

Whitney’s gin changed the game; the market for it spread faster than he could control or profit from. Demand for cotton, including the short-staple variety, exploded as England and France built new textile mills that craved the raw material. By 1804, Southern cotton production ballooned eight-fold from the decade before. Unlike Sea Island cotton, short-staple cotton could grow in upland areas, giving planters in vast swaths of the South a chance at riches previously confined to the coast. The War of 1812 disrupted trade with England, but entrepreneurial Northerners stepped into the breach. While a few cotton and wool spinning mills had been built in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut by 1805, scores more sprang up in the following decade. The number of mills within a 30-mile radius of Providence, R.I., doubled between 1812 and 1815, spurred by the same hopes of riches that induced Southerners to plant the cotton. The revolution was on.

The lucrative short-staple cotton trade helped create two Souths: An upper South of Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina that began moving away from the plantation model, selling their slaves to owners in the lower South—states like Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, where cotton planters desperately needed the labor. Land planted with cotton or tobacco and nothing else eventually was exhausted, and planters pushed west in search of fresh land and profits. South Carolina planter Wade Hampton is just one example. Hampton first journeyed west as an Army colonel and quickly saw the potential there, University of South Carolina history professor Lacy Ford notes. By 1812, he had acquired 38,000 acres and 285 slaves in Louisiana and Mississippi. “Ultimately, he produced more cotton there than he did in South Carolina,” Ford says.

“He became one of the four or five richest people in the South on the basis of his extensive holdings.” William Hamilton, a North Carolina native and one of Hampton’s top aides, wrote to his family about the new areas’ possibilities: “An acre of ground, well prepared, can yield 2,000 pounds of sugar and one good negro can make five bales of cotton worth $500 and 40 prime field hands can till 200 acres and produce $10,000 of cotton annually,” a huge fortune then. Ford says there was both a push and pull in the move west: The push was spent fields in the Carolinas and Virginia, and the pull was the promise of riches on new land. “A lot of people didn’t pick up and go, but a lot of people did,” he notes. In 1801, South Carolina produced half of the nation’s cotton. By 1821, the margin had dropped to 29 percent. Half of all whites born in South Carolina between 1800 and 1860 eventually left the state.

Natchez, Miss., became a new boomtown, and New Orleans soon overtook Charleston in shipping and population. The Cotton kingdom extended into eastern Texas and hundreds of miles up the Mississippi River. The flight west also created a big political problem as the abolition movement geared up and the nation quarreled over which new states should be permitted to have slaves and which should not. Big bucks were on the line. The South produced about three-fourths of the cotton that fed the textile mills in England and France. By one estimate, more than 20 percent of England’s economy depended in some way on the textile industry, and the United States’ domestic textile plants produced about $100 million worth of cloth each year; its ships transported cotton and cotton products across the globe. By 1860, two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton came from the states that would soon constitute the Confederacy. Cotton didn’t receive its coronation easily. Richard Porcher and Sarah Fick note in The Story of Sea Island Cotton, a recent history, the turbulence Lowcountry planters faced.

“Even with skilled slaves and the special care taken with the plants, sea island cotton was an uncertain crop, succumbing to unseasonable rains, storms, insect pests and a fluctuating market,” they write. The drive west meant a second “Middle Passage” for many slaves. After Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, the only way planters could get new slaves was to buy them on the domestic market, and the push west meant thousands of slaves were sold and relocated—and often torn away from their families. Meanwhile, pressure built to free the slaves—and it wasn’t coming only from the North. Two of Charleston’s elite, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, became abolitionists in 1830. With Angelina’s husband, Theodore Weld, they published Slavery As It Is: The Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.

The book included published excerpts from Southern newspapers that spoke to the institution’s cruelty: In The Raleigh Standard, they found this bit from Nash County, N.C., slave owner Micajah Ricks: “Ran away, a negro woman and two children, a few days before she went off, I burnt her face with a hot iron, on the left side of her face, I tried to make a letter M.” Slaves also were always resisting, trying to find ways to lighten their workload, get better provisions and more autonomy. As industrialization seemed increasingly likely, Southerners began to debate whether slaves or freed men should work in their emerging factories. Planters who owned large numbers of slaves produced most goods for export, but the South had many more small farmers, mostly whites, who farmed the upland areas—the lucky ones producing a small surplus of cotton for market while managing to feed their families. In 1850, the average South Carolina farm covered 541 acres, and that would drop to 488 acres by 1860. There were 33,171 farms, some wealthy but many less so.

Meanwhile, cotton prices oscillated wildly over the decades; prices were high until 1819 and then down, rose again until a crisis low in 1837 and then climbed back in 1848 with another dip coming in 1851. Some worried that cotton was dominating to the South’s detriment. Cotton “starves everything else,” warned W.J. Grayson, an outspoken unionist. “The farmer curtails and neglects all other crops. He buys from distant places not only the simplest manufactured articles, his brooms and buckets, but farm products, grain, meat, ham, butter, all of which he could make at home.” And there soon would be a need to make them. Ford, author of Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, says the single biggest misunderstanding about the Southern plantation economy is how diverse and ever-changing it was. By the beginning of the Civil War, the cotton gin had been around only as long as computers have been today. “It was a much more dynamic economy than most people realize,” he says. “It was newer, fresher and under constant strain.

Cotton production was only in its third generation when the Civil War came, and there were many people still alive who could remember when the first meaningful amount of cotton was grown in the South. “In the larger sense, in dealing with the lower Cotton South as a whole, it’s always important to remember the upper South—North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, is really a different kettle of fish. They planted almost no cotton, and they’re having a very different experience and reacting to circumstances differently as well.” Some Southerners might have accepted the coming Civil War because they had little land, slaves or anything else to lose, but others had significant sums at stake. “Throughout the lower south as a whole, the cotton boom of the 1850s and the prosperity that the boom created for the region gave it the self-confidence and belief that it had a system that would work,” Ford says, “and that probably enhanced people’s willingness to secede.” And though the coming war eventually would end slavery and the plantation economy it supported, the South would continue to plant and profit from cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco well into the 20th century.

Of course, it wasn’t the same, but on the other hand, the South’s plantation economy never stood still. Slavery Articles 1 For the last time, the American Civil War was not about states’ rights — Quartz Jake Flanagin April 08, 2015 Union and Confederate troops clash at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee, 1864. (Library of Congress/Kurz and Allison) Share Jake Flanagin April 08, 2015 This week marks the 150th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to the Union—an occasion for celebration, or mourning, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you fall on. In this way, the historiography of the Civil War is somewhat unique. Rarely in human history has a conflict’s losing side been lent such considerable say in how the textbooks remember it.

As such, American social studies curricula have long been hobbled by one of the most pervasive myths in US history: that the Civil War was fought to preserve (or undermine) the spectral concept of “states’ rights.” It’s a self-delusion some use to justify neo-Confederate pride: stars-and-bars bumper stickers, or remnants of Confederate iconography woven into some of today’s state flags . “It’s about Southern pride,” they insist. “It’s about heritage”—forgetting, intentionally perhaps, that slavery and its decade-spanning echoes are very much a part of the collective American heritage. Confederate denialism, in the form of states’ rights advocacy, permits sentimentalists to keep their questionable imagery without having to address its unsavory associations. Just how pervasive are these Confederate mythologies? An informal survey conducted in 2011 by James W. Loewen, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, found that 55% to 75% of American teachers—“regardless of region or race”—cite states’ rights as the chief reason for Southern secession.

This attitude is also reflected in a Pew Research Center poll from that same year, which found that nearly half (48%) of all Americans agreed: the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. Only 38% of those surveyed attribute the conflict to slavery. So-called states’ rights No one seems to be able to agree on which specific Southern rights were in danger, but that’s really beside the point. The fact is, Southern states seceded in spite of states’ rights, and the Confederacy’s founding documents offer plenty of proof. In its constitution , Confederate leaders explicitly provided for the federal protection of slaveholding: “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.” It’s a provision that clashes jarringly with neo-Confederate mythos—how could the South secede to preserve states’ rights if its own constitution mandated legal, federally protected slavery across state borders?

South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. On Dec. 24, 1860, its government issued a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” In it, South Carolinian leaders aired objections to laws in Northern states—specifically, those that sprung from the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that state authorities could not be forced to help return fugitive slaves to the South. Ensuing individual state legislation in New England would double down on that very ruling, expressly forbidding state officials from enforcing the federal Fugitive Slave Acts , or the use of state jails to detain fugitive slaves. In effect, South Carolina seceded because the federal government would not overturn abolitionist policies in Northern states. South Carolina seceded because the federal government would not violate a state’s right to abstain from slavery and its concomitant policies. Taxes and tariffs Another strain of Confederate apologia asserts secession inspired by high taxes, in the form of heavy tariffs. Once again, the neo-Confederates are wrong, and South Carolinian history proves it.

The state first raised the threat of secession in 1831 and 1833, events known collectively as the Nullification Crisis. South Carolina declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional, and therefore null within state borders. No other state government backed the move, president Jackson threatened force, and South Carolina abandoned the idea. No matter! A Virginian slaveholder wrote a new tariff in 1857, which was passed and generally well-received by Southern members of Congress as it stipulated a record-low rate. Thus, at the time of war, Southerners had no real reason to complain (with regards to tariffs): a plantation owner in Louisiana could export his cotton to Europe at the lowest tariff rate instituted since 1816. Counting states, taking sides It isn’t entirely inaccurate, however, to say that the war was fought over money. Most human conflicts are, in some way. In this case, the money issue centered around potential losses Southern titans of agribusiness would experience if slavery was abolished at the federal level.

Federally mandated emancipation would require a majority of free states in the US Senate—something Southern lawmakers fought tooth-and-nail to impede. As a result, the number of free and slave-states was kept equal until 1846, when the count reached 15 and 14, respectively. This imbalance exacerbated tensions between North and South significantly, reducing Southern leaders to a culture of extreme paranoia. Secession, in this sense, was very much a preemptive move. The Southern aristocracy feared the impending election of Abraham Lincoln would ultimately bring about nationwide emancipation. He and his supporters were known, after all, as “black Republicans,” a term purposefully designed to conjure an image of radical abolitionism. Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech of 1858 only aggravated tensions, clarifying the divide between an abolitionist North and a slave-dependent South: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.” Neo-Confederates regard the material of this speech as “proof” of Lincoln’s priority of concerns: preservation of the Union above abolition of slavery. They may be correct. But at the time of its delivery, Southern leaders heard these words and thought one thing: Lincoln aims to abolish slavery at the federal level. Lincoln aims to destroy our way of life. Declaring a Confederacy So, as this preemptive secession commenced, Southern state governments issued declarations of secession that placed the preservation of slavery front and center. Mississippi’s is perhaps the most infamous—though also among the most pragmatic. It generally concerns the preservation of the South’s slave-dependent export-economy. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” it reads.

“Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.” The declaration of secession for Texas is perhaps the most dogmatic. On Feb. 2, 1861, state leaders published a defense of slavery that amounted to little more than a bizarre, quasi-eugenic treatise for white supremacy .

“Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility [sic] and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people,” it begins, before taking a wildly offensive turn, even by the standards of the day: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.” Of all the state governments that published “declarations of the causes of secession” like these (some published shorter “ordinances of secession”), none mentioned the ostensible injustices of America’s tariff system. None complained of high taxes, or even states’ rights in a general sense. All, however, passionately pontificated on the necessity of preserving an institution of slavery; and that no such preservation could be maintained within the Union as it was then organized.

Ironically, secession, and the creation of a Confederacy was the only conceivable way of maintaining the status quo. Northern racists, Southern racists In a last-ditch effort to deny the integrality of slavery to Southern secession, a contemporary Confederate sympathizer will inevitably raise the issue of the Corwin amendment. Proposed in the US Senate by William H. Seward of New York and in the House by Thomas Corwin of Ohio in 1861, it was intended to lure seceded states back into the Union (and convince border states to remain) by promising to protect slaveholders from federal interference. Its reference is meant to convey a fallacious argument: that the impetus for secession could not have been the preservation of slavery because a few Northern politicians were willing to forgo abolition to keep the Union intact. The Corwin amendment was never actually implemented. Only three states—Ohio, Illinois, and Maryland—ratified it. But its mere proposal indicates that the North, like the South, was no ideological monolith. There were men who fought for the Union that believed in the institution of slavery, who believed blacks to be inherently inferior to whites.

Likewise, there were men who fought for the Confederacy that never owned slaves (the vast majority, in fact), who didn’t wish to, and who believed in the inherent equality of all men. But while the Civil War was fought, on the ground, by these ordinary men of diverse opinions, it was not a conflict of their own engineering. Southern secession was not a guerrilla insurgency nor a populist rebellion as the neo-Confederate romantics prefer to believe. It was a conflict between two well-heeled establishments: one that depended—economically and spiritually—on the continued enslavement of black people, and another that did not. Extant racism among Northerners does not extinguish this fact. Ultimately, the debate over motives for Southern secession trivializes the true shame of antebellum America: the existence of an institution of slavery all together. Which is why the effort to debunk Civil War myths must avoid becoming an exercise in elevating the morality of white Northerners. That too is beside the point. As history inarguably demonstrates, life for free African Americans in the postbellum North was subject to just as many miseries and injustices as in the South.

And although one region outpaced the other in the formal abolition of slavery, neither was immune to the informal perpetuation of inequities established by slave-trade. Obscuring Civil War history in hollow romance, refusing to recognize the true heritage of the Confederacy—these are just two of its many manifestations. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com . Read full story Civil War: Border States - Brothers at War Border States - Brothers at War History >> Civil War What were the border states? The border states during the Civil War were the slave states that didn't leave the Union. These states included Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. West Virginia, which separated from Virginia during the war, was also considered a border state. Border States by Ducksters Kentucky - President Abraham Lincoln considered Kentucky's loyalty to the Union as an important factor in the Union winning the Civil War. Kentucky began the war as a neutral state, but later came under Union control. Maryland - Maryland was also very important for the Union. The land of Maryland was the only thing standing between Virginia and the Union capital at Washington D.C. The war would have gone very differently had Maryland chosen to secede.

Maryland voted to abolish slavery during the war in 1864. Missouri - At the start of the war Missouri decided to remain with the Union and not secede, but many people in the state felt that the war against the Confederacy was wrong. As the war progressed, the Missouri state government split into two rival governments. One of the state governments voted to secede from the Union while the other wanted to stay. As a result, the state was claimed by both the Union and the Confederacy for a period of time. Delaware - Although Delaware was a slave state, few people in the state owned slaves at the outbreak of the war. The state didn't actually border any Confederate states and was always loyal to the Union. West Virginia - When the state of Virginia seceded from the Union, West Virginia broke away and formed its own state. It remained loyal to the Union, however, the people of West Virginia were split. Around 20,000 West Virginia men fought on the side of the Confederacy. Other Border States Other states that are sometimes considered border states include Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas. All of these states had strong support for both the Confederacy and the Union. Why were they important?

Keeping control of the border states played an important role in the victory for the Union. These states gave the Union the advantage in troops, factories, and money. Did everyone support the Union? Not everyone in the border states supported the Union. In some cases, like Missouri and West Virginia, the support for each side was fairly evenly split. Thousands of soldiers from the border states headed south and joined the Confederate Army. There were also politicians in these states who fought hard for secession. Even if they didn't want secession, many of the people of the border states thought the war against the Confederacy was wrong. They felt that the states should be able to leave the country if they wanted. Slavery and Emancipation The border states were the primary reason that President Lincoln waited so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Abolitionists in the North were demanding that he free the slaves. However, Lincoln knew he needed to win the war. He was stuck between wanting to free the slaves and needing the border states to win the war. He knew he had to win the war to truly free the slaves. Did brothers really fight brothers? Yes. There were many cases where brothers were fighting brothers on the same battlefield.

Families all across the country were split over the issue. Even sons fought against their fathers. Interesting Facts about the Border States During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln once said that "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky." Brothers James and William Terrill each became brigadier generals, William for the North and James for the South. Although Tennessee seceded, it came under Union control in 1862. Missouri and Kansas became the home of small raids and guerrilla warfare. The worst of these raids was the Lawrence massacre where a small band of Confederates killed around 160 civilians in Lawrence, Kansas. Activities The Civil War Resource Bank Contents On November 6, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States -- an event that outraged southern states. The Republican party had run on an anti-slavery platform, and many southerners felt that there was no longer a place for them in the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded. By Febrary 1, 1861, six more states -- Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas -- had split from the Union.

The seceded states created the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi Senator, as their provisional president. In his inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, Lincoln proclaimed that it was his duty to maintain the Union. He also declared that he had no intention of ending slavery where it existed, or of repealing the Fugitive Slave Law -- a position that horrified African Americans and their white allies. Lincoln's statement, however, did not satisfy the Confederacy, and on April 12 they attacked Fort Sumter, a federal stronghold in Charleston, South Carolina. Federal troops returned the fire. The Civil War had begun. Immediately following the attack, four more states -- Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee -- severed their ties with the Union. To retain the loyalty of the remaining border states -- Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri -- President Lincoln insisted that the war was not about slavery or black rights; it was a war to preserve the Union. His words were not simply aimed at the loyal southern states, however -- most white northerners were not interested in fighting to free slaves or in giving rights to black people.

For this reason, the government turned away African American voluteers who rushed to enlist. Lincoln upheld the laws barring blacks from the army, proving to northern whites that their race privilege would not be threatened. There was an exception, however. African Americans had been working aboard naval vessels for years, and there was no reason that they should continue. Black sailors were therefore accepted into the U.S. Navy from the beginning of the war. Still, many African Americans wanted to join the fighting and continued to put pressure on federal authorities. Even if Lincoln was not ready to admit it, blacks knew that this was a war against slavery. Some, however, rejected the idea of fighting to preserve a Union that had rejected them and which did not give them the rights of citizens. The federal government had a harder time deciding what to do about escaping slaves. Because there was no consistent federal policy regarding fugitives, individual commanders made their own decisions. Some put them to work for the Union forces; others wanted to return them to their owners. Finally, on August 6, 1861, fugitive slaves were declared to be "contraband of war" if their labor had been used to aid the Confederacy in any way.

And if found to be contraband, they were declared free. As the northern army pushed southward, thousands of fugitives fled across Union lines. Neither the federal authorities nor the army were prepared for the flood of people, and many of the refugees suffered as a result. Though the government attempted to provide them with confiscated land, there was not enough to go around. Many fugitives were put into crowded camps, where starvation and disease led to a high death rate. Northern citizens, black and white alike, stepped in to fill the gap. They organized relief societies and provided aid. They also organized schools to teach the freedmen, women, and children to read and write, thus giving an education to thousands of African Americans throughout the war. Though "contraband" slaves had been declared free, Lincoln continued to insist that this was a war to save the Union, not to free slaves. But by 1862, Lincoln was considering emancipation as a necessary step toward winning the war. The South was using enslaved people to aid the war effort. Black men and women were forced to build fortifications, work as blacksmiths, nurses, boatmen, and laundresses, and to work in factories, hospitals, and armories.

In the meantime, the North was refusing to accept the services of black volunteers and freed slaves, the very people who most wanted to defeat the slaveholders. In addition, several governments in Europe were considering recognizing the Confederacy and intervening against the Union. If Lincoln declared this a war to free the slaves, European public opinion would overwhelmingly back the North. On July 22, 1862, Lincoln showed a draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. It proposed to emancipate the slaves in all rebel areas on January 1, 1863. Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed with the proposal, but cautioned Lincoln to wait until the Union had a major victory before formally issuing the proclamation. Lincoln's chance came after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862. He issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22. The proclamation warned the Confederate states to surrender by January 1, 1863, or their slaves would be freed. Some people were critical of the proclamation for only freeing some of the slaves. Others, including Frederick Douglass, were jubilant.

Douglass felt that it was the beginning of the end of slavery, and that it would act as a "moral bombshell" to the Confederacy. Yet he and others feared that Lincoln would give in to pressure from northern conservatives, and would fail to keep his promise. Despite the opposition, however, the president remained firm. On January 1, 1863, he issued the final Emancipation Proclamation. With it he officially freed all slaves within the states or parts of states that were in rebellion and not in Union hands. This left one million slaves in Union territory still in bondage. Throughout the North, African Americans and their white allies were exhuberant. They packed churches and meeting halls and celebrated the news. In the South, most slaves did not hear of the proclamation for months. But the purpose of the Civil War had now changed. The North was not only fighting to preserve the Union, it was fighting to end slavery. Throughout this time, northern black men had continued to pressure the army to enlist them. A few individual commanders in the field had taken steps to recruit southern African Americans into their forces.

But it was only after Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation that the federal army would officially accept black soldiers into its ranks. African American men rushed to enlist. This time they were accepted into all-black units. The first of these was the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment, led by white officer Robert Gould Shaw. Their heroism in combat put to rest worries over the willingness of black soldiers to fight. Soon other regiments were being formed, and in May 1863 the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops. Black recruiters, many of them abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, brought in troops from throughout the North. Douglass proclaimed, "I urge you to fly to arms and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave." Others, such as Harriet Tubman, recruited in the South.

On March 6, 1863, the Secretary of War was informed that "seven hundred and fifty blacks who were waiting for an opportunity to join the Union Army had been rescued from slavery under the leadership of Harriet Ross Tubman...." By the end of the war more than 186,000 black soldiers had joined the Union army; 93,000 from the Confederate states, 40,000 from the border slave states, and 53,000 from the free states. Black soldiers faced discrimination as well as segregation. The army was extremely reluctant to commission black officers -- only one hundred gained commissions during the war. African American soldiers were also given substandard supplies and rations. Probably the worst form of discrimination was the pay differential. At the beginning of black enlistment, it was assumed that blacks would be kept out of direct combat, and the men were paid as laborers rather than as soldiers. Black soldiers therefore received $7 per month, plus a $3 clothing allowance, while white soldiers received $13 per month, plus $3.50 for clothes. Black troops strongly resisted this treatment.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment served a year without pay rather than accept the unfair wages. Many blacks refused to enlist because of the discriminatory pay. Finally, in 1864, the War Department sanctioned equal wages for black soldiers. In the South, most slaveholders were convinced that their slaves would remain loyal to them. Some did, but the vast majority crossed Union lines as soon as Northern troops entered their vicinity. A Confederate general stated in 1862 that North Carolina was losing approximately a million dollars every week because of the fleeing slaves. Numbers of white southerners also refused to support the Confederacy. From the beginning, there were factions who vehemently disagreed with secession and remained loyal to the Union. Many poor southern whites became disillusioned during the course of the war. Wealthy planters had been granted exemptions from military service early on. This became especially inflammatory when the South instituted the draft in 1862 and the exemptions remained in place. It became clear to many poor southern whites that the war was being waged by the rich planters and the poor were fighting it. In addition, the common people were hit hard by wartime scarcity. By 1863, there was a food shortage.

Riots and strikes occurred as inflation soared and people became desperate. There were also northerners who resisted the war effort. Some were pacifists. Others were white men who resented the fact that the army was drafting them at the same time it excluded blacks. And there were whites who refused to fight once black soldiers were admitted. The North was also hit by economic depression, and enraged white people rioted against African Americans, who they accused of stealing their jobs. Finally, on April 18, 1865, the Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederate army. 617,000 Americans had died in the war, approximately the same number as in all of America's other wars combined. Thousands had been injured. The southern landscape was devastated. A new chapter in American history opened as the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in January of 1865, was implemented. It abolished slavery in the United States, and now, with the end of the war, four million African Americans were free. Thousands of former slaves travelled throughout the south, visiting or searching for loved ones from whom they had become separated. Harriet Jacobs was one who returned to her old home.

Former slaveholders faced the bewildering fact of emancipation with everything from concern to rage to despair. Men and women -- black and white and in the North and South -- now began the work of rebuilding the shattered union and of creating a new social order. This period would be called Reconstruction. It would hold many promises and many tragic disappointments. It was the beginning of a long, painful struggle, far longer and more difficult than anyone could realize. It was the beginning of a struggle that is not yet finished. As part of Reconstruction, two new amendments were added to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in June 1865, granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in February of 1869, guaranteed that no American would be denied the right to vote on the basis of race. For many African Americans, however, this right would be short-lived. Following Reconstruction, they would be denied their legal right to vote in many states until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But all of this was yet to come. The Americans of 1865 were standing at the point between one era and another. What they knew was that slavery was dead.

With that 250 year legacy behind them, they faced the future. Border State Civil War Secession Border States Slavery Map Delaware Border State Civil War History Delaware was a border slave state that unanimously voted to stay in the Union during the Civil War. Although Delaware is the second smallest state in the United States, its population was approximately 112,216 at the beginning of the war. Its size makes it a useful microcosm in understanding the divisiveness of the war. Factionalism, from abolitionism to secessionism, existed in Delaware, but many of its citizens did not align with either extreme. For example, there are three counties in Delaware. New Castle, which contains the city of Wilmington, was a center of trade, industry, and Republicanism. The two other counties, Kent and Sussex, were agricultural and generally pro-Southern. Thousands of men enlisted in the Union, but several hundred joined the Confederacy. Communities were divided, and Union troops had to patrol election polls to protect Republican voters. After the colonial period,the agricultural economy of the state began to shift from tobacco to mixed farming, which created less need for slave labor.

In 1860, there were 1,789 slaves in the state and 19,829 free African Americans. Many slaves ran away during the war, and some elected to serve the Union. In 1863, 954 African Americans joined the Union army, and handful of others served in the navy. However, many citizens of this state were not happy with the Emancipation Proclamation. In the 1864 election, they voted for George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate. After the war, Delaware Democrats rejected the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and worked to disenfranchise African Americans for several decades. Although Delaware was not a battlefield, the war did find its way into the First State. Fort Delaware became a prison for Confederate prisoners of war. The fortress was completed shortly before the war began and is located on Pea Patch Island. The fort earned a reputation for cruelty and the moniker “Andersonville of the North.” However, the death rate in Fort Delaware, which supported a prison population of over 30,000, was only 7.6%.

Most northern prisoners had a rate of twenty-one percent. See also: Sectionalism and Causes of the American Civil War . Union, Confederate, Civil War Border States Map Union, Confederate, Border State Civil War Strategy Map Kentucky Border State Civil War History The Bluegrass State claims as native sons and daughters many of the leading figures of the Civil War era, such as Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. One of Kentucky’s more prominent nineteenth century Senators, Henry Clay, spent much of his career trying to compromise the issue of slavery before the war. His most well known efforts were in crafting the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the later Compromise of 1850. As clear from these most prominent residents, Kentucky was a state of divided loyalties and families torn apart. The state provided 90,000 troops to the Union and 35,000 to the Confederacy. Nowhere was this division more evident than in the "First Family." Several members of Mary Todd Lincoln's family fought for the South. Another family similarly divided was that of U.S. Senator John Crittenden, whose two sons were generals on opposite sides.

Some historians even say that the ensuing family feuds, such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, carried on the war in Kentucky long after its official end. Civil War Border State Election Map Results Civil War Border States and President Election Map Results In 1861, Kentucky’s governor, Beriah Magoffin, favored secession, but the legislature voted to remain neutral. The major slaveholding areas in the Bluegrass Region and the western counties favored the Confederacy and sent many recruits to its army. Early in the war, however, the Union entered Kentucky. By the end of the Battle of Perryville in 1862, Confederate forces had retreated from the state. Although a rival secessionist government was formed, it had little power. For the remainder of the war, Kentucky was the target of Confederate raids by John Hunt Morgan, William Quantrill, Nathan Bedford Forrest and “Sue” Mundy. These raiders destroyed supply lines, depots, public and private property. When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it did not apply to Kentucky because it was a Border State.

However, when he offered freedom to slaves who joined the Union army, numerous slaves fled to Camp Nelson, Kentucky, which became a recruitment center and major fugitive slave camp. Although the 13th amendment freed all slaves in 1865, the Kentucky General Assembly failed to ratify the 13th, 14th or 15th amendments to the Constitution (each need to be ratified by ï¿½ of the states). As a symbolic gesture, the amendments were officially ratified by the state on March 18, 1976. See also: Kentucky Civil War Border State: A History , States' Rights , and Civil War Border States History: HOMEPAGE . Missouri Border State Civil War History In 1820, Missouri gained national attention as the focus of the Missouri Compromise. It was the northernmost slave state in the Mississippi River valley, and when its neighbor Kansas wanted to enter the Union in 1854 as a free state, trouble erupted along the border. Missouri Compromise of 1820: The admission of Missouri as a state in 1820 provoked a contentious national debate over slavery.

Missouri was the second state to be carved from the vast territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase and was to be admitted as a slave state. This aroused concern in the North. After much wrangling, a compromise was worked out. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, Maine was admitted as a free state at the same time that Missouri came in as a slave state, maintaining the balance between slave and free states. Additionally, Congress prohibited slavery in all western territories lying above 36ï¿½ 30' latitude (the southern boundary of Missouri). Compromise of 1850: As a result of the Mexican War (1846-1848), the United States won vast acreage in the West (present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Texas). This acquisition renewed the controversy over slavery in the territories. California applied for admission as a free state in 1850. Southern political leaders were concerned that this would upset the balance of 15 free and 15 slave states. They also were disturbed by northern agitation to end slavery in the District of Columbia and by the passage of "personal liberty" laws in the northern states.

The personal liberty laws aimed to restrict the cooperation of state officials in enforcing the federal fugitive slave law. Southern senators blocked the admission of California and a crisis was at hand. Prolonged negotiation finally produced a series of measures that became known as the Compromise of 1850. Aspects of the compromise included 1) admission of California as a free state; 2) a stronger fugitive slave law; 3) assurance that Congress would not interfere with the interstate traffic in slaves in the South; and 4) prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Finally, an act allowed the citizens of the remaining territories to be carved out of former Mexican land to decide for themselves on allowing slavery. Optimists believed that these measures constituted a lasting settlement of the divisive issue of slavery, but this was not to be. Kansas-Nebraska Act: In 1853-1854, the slavery issue got tied up with the effort to build a transcontinental railroad. In order to achieve territorial organization of land that a railroad to the West Coast might pass through, the Democratic Party had to make concessions to the South.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave the people of those territories the authority to decide on the legal status of slavery, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise line. This act kicked off seven years of intense national dispute over slavery, culminating in secession and, finally, civil war in 1861. Northerners were outraged at the Kansas-Nebraska Act's repeal of a long-established compromise. Pro- and anti-slavery factions immediately converted the territory of Kansas into a bloody battleground. Border Wars: The years of 1854-1861 were a turbulent time in Kansas territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 established the territorial boundaries of Kansas and Nebraska and opened the land to legal settlement. It allowed the residents of these territories to decide by popular vote whether their state would be free or slave. This concept of self-determination was called "popular sovereignty." In Kansas, people on all sides of this controversial issue flooded the territory, trying to influence the vote in their favor. Rival territorial governments, election fraud, and squabbles over land claims all contributed to the violence of this era.

United States in 1860 Map Border States, Free States, Slave States, and Territories Map Three distinct political groups occupied neighboring Kansas: pro-slavers, free-staters and abolitionists. Violence broke out immediately between these opposing factions and continued until January 29,1861, when Kansas entered the Union as a free state. This era became forever known in the state as "Bleeding Kansas." As Missourians tried to influence internal politics in Kansas, random violence became commonplace. Missouri guerrillas and Kansas jayhawkers raided and killed at will. A major event in during this time period was the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1857, which not only denied the slave Dred Scott and his wife their freedom, but went on to declare that African Americans per se were not citizens under the Constitution. Scott and his wife had filed their first petitions in the courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 would legitimize the killing that had plagued Missouri for years. Union General Nathaniel Lyon, an ardent abolitionist, commanded all Union troops in the state.

Former governor Sterling "Pap" Price became the commander of the pro-secession Missouri State Guard. The two sides met at Wilson's Creek in August of 1861. Lyon boldly attacked the Missouri State Guard that had been joined by a larger Confederate force, and even though he lost the battle and his life, he succeeded in keeping the state under Union control. Although Missouri remained under Union control for the rest of the war, as a Border State, it provided troops to both sides, pitting neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, and father against son. Guerrilla warfare reigned over the state for the remainder of the war, during which time William Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, and Frank and Jesse James began their infamous careers. A unified Confederate force was not seen in Missouri again until late 1864, when Sterling Price failed in a desperate attempt to regain control of the state. Legend has it that every general on both sides of the Civil War served at Jefferson Barracks at one time. Among those who did are Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman.

During the war, Jefferson Barracks had one of the largest Federal hospitals in the country, with over 3,000 beds, accommodating patients from battles as far away as Vicksburg. The Jefferson Barracks Historical Park exhibits photos, medical equipment, uniforms and weapons housed in buildings that were used during the Civil War. Among the Civil War veterans buried in the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery are 1,140 Confederates. See also: Missouri Civil War Border State: A History , Causes of the American Civil War , and Civil War Border States History: HOMEPAGE . Border State Reconstruction Map West Virginia Border State Civil War History The Mountain State entered the Union on June 20, 1863. Forming the western region of Virginia, West Virginia severed its ties from Virginia, and was only one of two states created during the Civil War (the other being Nevada). Not only did it incur revolutionary political changes, but it was the scene of several national events. The first shots of the impending war were fired on the night of October 16, 1859.

Abolitionist John Brown led an armed band of twenty-one men to Harpers Ferry, a strategic location on the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers near Washington, D.C. (known as Washington City at the time). Brown and his men captured the federal armory, arsenal, and Hall’s Rifle Works. His men held sixty citizens as hostages in hopes of persuading their slaves to join them, but no slaves came forward. President Buchanan sent the federal militia to put an end to the raid. The state of Virginia charged Brown with treason. Southerners condemned the raid, while militant abolitionists proclaimed him a martyr. Western Virginians were acutely aware of the divisiveness of the Civil War. When the Richmond Convention decided to secede from the Union in April 1861, northwestern delegates immediately returned to their home counties to drum up Union support before Virginians voted on the Ordinance. John S. Carlile, an influential politician and powerful orator, called for the formation of a new state at this First Wheeling Convention, but other delegates believed such an act was illegal, since this act required the permission of the older state.

When the Secession Ordinance was approved in May, a Second Wheeling Convention was called. The delegates formed the Reorganized Government of Virginia based in Wheeling. They elected a new Virginia governor (Francis Pierpont) and appointed new Virginia Senators (John Carlile and Arthur Boreman). Delegates were divided and argued throughout the whole process, debating the state’s size and the issue of slavery. Carlile was asked to draft a report on West Virginia statehood. As a conservative dismayed with the radical Congress, he tried to sabotage the bill. Boreman managed to save it with the addition of the Willey Amendment, which provided for emancipation. The bill was approved by Congress, but President Lincoln questioned the legality before he finally signed the bill December 31, 1862. It went back to the voters, who approved the amended bill. West Virginia became the 35th state on June 20, 1863. Present-day US Census Bureau Border States Map Present-day Census Bureau Border State Map The Union Army facilitated these revolutionary political changes when it achieved control of northwestern Virginia early in the war.

The army was able to retain control through engagements in Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Carnifex Ferry. In 1862, Clarksburg native Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson swept through on his Shenandoah Valley campaign, resulting in skirmishes in the Eastern Panhandle. Despite general Union control, this did not mean West Virginians were safe from confederate raiders. Guerrilla warfare persisted after 1863 until the end of the war, including the Jones-Imboden Raid, Battle of Droop Mountain, and raids by McNeill’s Rangers of Hardy County. For many years it was thought that West Virginians produced significantly more Union soldiers than Confederates, but recent scholarship indicates that the numbers are about 20,000 for each side. The divisiveness of this period continued long after the war ended. See also: West Virginia Civil War Border State: A History , Secession, Border States, and Civil War , and Civil War Border States History: HOMEPAGE . (Sources and related reading below.) Site search

Question: What was the Northern most slave state of the US Civil War?
Answer: Delaware