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Fulcrum Of The Union: The Border South And The Secession Crisis, 1859-1861, Michael Dudley Robinson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Border South states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri spurned secession in 1860-61, which has led scholars to conclude that these four slaveholding states were safely ensconced in the Union column from the beginning of the crisis that drew the other slaveholding states into the Confederacy. Historians have often simplified the secession crisis in the Border South, minimizing the likelihood that these states with smaller concentrations of enslaved persons and a more diversified economy and society than the Upper and Lower South would ever leave the Union. This work seeks to add contingency to the story of the Border …