Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union by William C. Harris (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2012 93 Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union William C. Harris William C. Harris’s examination of Lincoln’s pivotal interactions with the border states is well-written and interesting, but ultimately represents a missed opportunity. The author of three previous studies of Abraham Lincoln’s rise to the presidency and years as president in the past dozen years, Harris is certainly knowledgeable about the sixteenth president . He writes well, describing the intricacies of Civil War politics and personalities with clear prose. However, most of his research and interpretation comes from the work of others, making this volume more of a summation of other, more detailed studies than a fresh investigation. Harris sensibly argues that Lincoln “correctly concluded that the suppression of the southern insurrection depended on securing and maintaining the loyalty of the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri” (1). Herein lays an important problem with the scope of this study. After admitting that West Virginia “became a border state during the war,” Harris dismisses it from his analysis . Why? Apparently because “West Virginia lacked the importance of Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland in the Civil War” (9). Yet the state united geographically Delaware (also largely absent from this study) and Maryland in the East with Kentucky and Missouri in the West. Harris acknowledges that “like these border states, it remained divided over Lincoln’s antislavery policies and the enlistment of black troops in the Union army” (9). True, West Virginia did not become the thirty-fifth state in the Union until June 1863, but Lincoln thought about and interacted with leaders of the Restored Government of Virginia long before that date. He anguished over whether a loyal population could secede from a seceded state to rejoin the Union. Ultimately, Lincoln decided that “there is still difference enough between secession against the constitution, and secession in favor of the constitution” to make the creation of West Virginia expedient during the crisis of the Union (Lincoln, “Opinion on the Admission of West Virginia into the Union,” Dec. 31, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. [1953-1955], 6:28). Congress insisted that West Virginia’s constitution must include a policy of gradual emancipation, an important William C. Harris. Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. 424 pp. ISBN: 9780700618040 (cloth), $34.95. BOOK REVIEWS 94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY factor in the demise of slavery along the border. However, because he excludes West Virginia, Harris ignores this part of the story. Harris also rightly points out that “few problems during the Civil War created more anguish for Lincoln than the factionalism among Unionists in the border states and the oftenrelated conflict between military commanders and civil officials” (7). In the pages that follow, Harris offers ample examples of such conflict and Lincoln’s sometimes-deft, sometimes-clumsy responses to these crises. Although Harris clearly admires Lincoln, he does not hesitate to criticize his handling of some of these conflicts. Harris challenges those historians who conclude that the border states were “secure for the Union” by December 1861. Instead, “Confederate military campaigns in those states in 1862-1864 and the insecurities caused by guerrilla activities in Missouri and to a lesser extent in Kentucky kept the border region in turmoil. Political and social conditions remained volatile” (7-8). “The border state governors,” Harris argues, “by virtue of their constitutional responsibilities, assumed the lead in their states’ official response to the crisis created by Lincoln’s election and the secession of the lower South during the winter of 1860-1861” (21). The governors of these states and their successors during the war generally represented a conservative, slaveholding Unionist constituency that Lincoln desperately wanted to retain for the Union. Unfortunately, Harris does not draw on the papers of any of these governors . In fact, the only primary sources cited in this study seem to come from the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, the War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, and newspapers cited by other authors. Important sources, to be sure...