Lincoln and the Union Governors

The Secession Crisis

4 c h a p t e r o n e The Secession Crisis During the course of the Civil War, fifty-nine men served as governors of the twenty-five Union states. These included the governors of the Northern free states; West Virginia, which was admitted to statehood in 1863; Nevada, admitted in 1864; and the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which remained faithful to the Union. They did not include the western territorial governors or those of the six rebel states—Virginia, Tennessee , Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas—where Lincoln attempted to establish loyal governments, with mixed results. Of the fifty-nine, only Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania, William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, and John A. Andrew of Massachusetts served from the beginning of the war to the end. Richard Yates of Illinois and Austin Blair of Michigan held the office for almost all of the war. Politically, the majority of the Northern governors, like Lincoln, became Republicans after a long affiliation with the prewar Whig Party. At least one of them, Alexander W. Randall of Wisconsin, had been both a Whig and a Democrat before affiliating with the antislavery Republican Party in the mid-1850s. Most of the border state governors also had associated with the Union Whig Party or its offshoot in the 1850s, the Know-Nothing Party, making it relatively easy for them to cooperate with Lincoln in preserving the Union, but not in his antislavery policies and military intervention in their states. The Secession Crisis | 5 The governors often reflected different regional interests. The northeastern governors were keenly attuned to the commercial, banking, and industrial interests of the East. Their counterparts in the West (today’s Midwest) dutifully represented their section’s agricultural concerns and dependence on the Mississippi-Ohio river system for the region’s markets. The governors of the semi-frontier states of Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Wisconsin, while vigorously supporting the war, were deeply concerned with Indian conflict, federal land policy, and railroad development. The new state of Kansas also faced the continuation of a bitter border struggle with proslavery elements in Missouri. In the Far West, the governors of California and Oregon were concerned with political conflict at home and insecurity from Indian attacks after the withdrawal of U.S. Army troops from frontier fortifications, especially in Oregon and the Washington territory. A conspiracy to establish a so-called “Pacific Republic,” though exaggerated , convulsed the Far West during the early part of the Civil War. Even after Republican governors replaced Southern rights’ Democrats in 1862, California and Oregon still faced some of the same issues as their counterparts in the East, namely Lincoln’s antislavery policies, his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the Copperhead or antiwar threat.1 The Union governors of the border slave states had two overwhelming concerns in the war. They were determined to protect slavery, at least until 1863, and they were equally determined for their states to control race relations. They expected Lincoln to stand by his promise not to interfere with slavery in their states. In 1861, these governors also wanted to avoid being drawn into the middle of an internecine conflict between the North and the South, which they realized would be destructive and would tear their communities apart. The Northern governors during the first part of the war acknowledged that slavery was wrong, but they held different views on what should or could be done about it. However, they agreed with Lincoln and with the Republican platform that slavery should not be permitted to expand into the western territories. While believing that slavery was the cause of the war, lower North governors often denounced the abolitionists as well as the Southern fire-eaters for the sectional 6 | The Secession Crisis division. The border state governors, on the other hand, placed the blame for the conflict almost squarely on the Northern antislavery agitators and the Republicans. Upper North governors, unlike their lower North counterparts, opposed the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 for the return of escaping slaves to their masters. The New England governors and Austin Blair of Michigan, a native of upstate New York, were more ardent opponents of slavery and Southern society than their lower North colleagues. Still, at the beginning of the war, these governors largely muted their strong antislavery and anti...