Dateline: Martinsburg, WV, A Navalist's Perverse Civil War History, Part 1a-the Border States

Yesterday was a lovely drive through Western Virginia (NOT West Virginia, for obvious reasons...), along I-81, through the Shenandoah Valley. As I drove through the Valley, I was struck by how broad and wide it is-it's not a V-shaped river valley, it's a U-shaped glacial valley, like the one where I grew up. It was also surprising to me to see how agricultural it was. I sort of remembered that it had been a breadbasket, but I had no idea. The barns and silos looked exactly like the ones I remember back home in Western Washington.

This helps me understand why there was so much Civil War fighting here, in addition to the obvious-if you have troops in the Shenandoah Valley, not only can they live off the land pretty easily, but they are both (a) protected from any attack from the east and (b) poised to strike easily at Washington, DC. Hence any Union drive toward Richmond had to worry about a threat from their right flank or, worse, being cut off from Washington, D.C.

I'm actually in West Virginia, now, which has kind of a crazy shape on account of how it was split off from Virginia during the Civil War. To begin with, Maryland has this crazy "hook" which wraps around the northern edge of West Virginia, and the counties that form Eastern West Virginia also form a bit of a hook into Virginia.

This seems as good a time as any to talk about the Border States in the Civil War, even if I get a little ahead of the game. In all of the slave-holding states, there were some who favored secession and some who favored union. In fact, there was a little known, but temporarily very serious, movement in New York City to secede and become a Free City. Nothing could better exemplify New York's commercial, cantankerous, and Dutch heritage than to become a Free City, open to ships of both sides in the conflict. However, the city leaders had clearly taken leave of their senses-such secession would only be viable or wise for New York City if the North was unwilling to fight-Manhattan certainly would not have held out against Federal troops nor a Federal blockade of New York Harbor.

With the remarkable exception of New York, secessionist sentiment tract very clearly with slave population. First to secede was South Carolina, 59% slave, followed by six other states (from Mississippi at 52% to Texas at 30%). This left a band of states with 25-29% slaves (AK, TN, NC, VA), all of which stayed in the Union until Lincoln called for volunteers to raise an Army after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Once it became clear that a fight was brewing, these states preferred to fight with rather than against the other Southern states. Here is a great irony. It might have been possible to hold the Upper South in the Union by letting the Deep South go in peace-trying to subdue the South enlarged it-but secession of more states would have threatened at every turn.

Ironically, in three of these states of the Middle South, TN, VA, and NC, there was one region that was strongly Unionist: the Appalachians. The hill folk were not, with few exceptions, slavers, and slave populations in these counties were exceptionally low. They weren't interested in fighting for slavery, and had no particular fear of emancipation. Ironically, to many Yankees in the late 20th century, the hillbilly redneck is considered to be the last refuge of Confederate sentiment. While there is a grain of truth to this, given how slowly change comes to the hills, it's interesting how the Jacksonian Scots-Irish wanted nothing to do with Jeff Davis' war for the Slave Power. Unfortunately for the Union, Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina were simply out of reach-Union armies could not backstop Union sentiment in these regions (though in the case of Tennessee, Lincoln tried to push his generals to obtain control of the region-it was simply too difficult for the Union to pull off). In the case of Virginia, however, local Union sentiment paired up with the presence of Union troops to produce...a secession from seceded Virginia to form West Virginia. Since WV is an agglomeration of counties, its shape is a little goofy out where I'm at.

But back to the other border states. Much of the tiptoeing by Lincoln in coming months had to do with trying to hold onto the last four slave states, which had not declared for the CSA after raising a Federal Army following the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861: KY (20% slave), MO(15%), MD(13%), and DE(2%). There was never any fear that Delaware would go Confederate, though the other three gave quite a scare to Lincoln. Maryland's Unionists seem to have benefited greatly from the presence of large numbers of Union troops-some of Lincoln's most controversial acts, such as the suspension of habeas corpus in MD, were attempts to secure the state for the Union. In both MD and MO, Union sympathy seems to have been in a strong majority, but sizable numbers of Confederate sympathizers were a worry throughout the war. In Missouri, this took the form of lawless raiders. While the populations centers of Missouri were fairly firmly under US Army control (except in the southern part of the state until 1862), the wide stretches of backwoods were the province of anarchy and raiders, like the notorious Jessee James. Missouri continued to be plagued by lawlessness in the decades after the Civil War. While I've never heard it argued, it wouldn't surprise me if many of the outlaws and outlaw dynamics that typify the Old West in the decades after the Civil War didn't just radiate out from Missouri's Civil War anarchy, advancing in a westward band at the edge of strong governmental control from 1865 to the end of the frontier in 1890.

Kentucky was the most evenly split state, with 2/5 of Kentuckians who fought in the war wearing grey and 3/5 wearing blue. This was the sate where the "brother on brother" meme was actually very true. KY was initially neutral, with strong sentiment going both ways. KY declared for the Union after the CSA "invaded" Columbus, KY, but throughout 1861, the presence of CS troops in KY and Confederate sentiment made the state a true battleground in reality. In both Missouri and Kentucky, Confederate troops held much of the southern parts of the state, but in the long run these were fairly untenable positions. A Confederacy that firmly held all of Kentucky, and could defend the state along the entirety of the Ohio River, or one that firmly held Missouri all the way up the Mississippi to St. Louis, would have been in a much stronger strategic position, but unlike in Virginia, these states simply did not have the Confederate sympathy (or slaves) to make this a reality. If one is to search for counterfactuals, one can certainly imagine a less deft diplomat than Abraham Lincoln driving these slave states into the Confederacy in 1861.