Why do you think the border states chose to remain in the Union despite their support of slavery?

1 Answer
May 21, 2016

Not all of them had a choice.

Explanation:

An unfortunate fact for the Confederacy was that Washington DC, the North's capital, was geographically located in the South and federal troops made sure it would not languish behind enemy lines. While states in the deep South could secede with relative ease, Maryland (as my old school Marylander uncle liked to remind Virginian me) "didn't have a river to hide behind." Neither did Delaware.

And while Kentucky and Missouri had a lot of Confederate sympathizers, they did not have a plurality of secession voters. Tennessee, which did secede, had a lot of Union loyalists and spent most of the war under US military governance, as did Northern Virginia and parts of Louisiana. (The Emancipation Proclamation exempted many counties of several Southern states from its edict as a political compromise that lasted until the war ended.)

A surprising number of Southerners did not want to secede over the issue of slavery, and many slaveholders in border states were able to buy time to keep their holdings (few Southern fortunes did not involve a big investment in slavery) for the duration of the war. Remember the scene in Gone With the Wind where Rhett Butler cordially played poker with his Northern captors? A lot of Southerners made hard and pragmatic decisions about their futures, and that is simply the way wars are played out.