Maryland and Delaware were also kept out of the Confederacy so as not to isolate Washington from the rest of the Union, a situation that would have been strategically untenable. It also kept that region's troops and supplies out of the hands of the Confederates, preventing their use against the Union.Īdditionally, it weakened the Western portion of the Confederacy by removing Missouri from the mix and maintaining a delicate strategic advantage in the East. This had the effect of insuring that the Ohio River would not become the Northern border of the Confederacy, which would have complicated an invasion of the South. In addition to securing these border states for the North, Lincoln was also able to secure the western counties of Virginia for the Union which he was only too happy to admit as the new state of West Virginia. Lincoln was successful in securing the border states, preventing them from seceding from the Union, and demonstrating a knack for handling each situation in just the right way. In addition, Kentucky, like Missouri and Maryland, had many confederate sympathizers that Lincoln did not want to provoke. He didn’t want to take any anti-slavery action, which might jeopardize the situation and cause Kentucky to revoke its neutrality and secede from the Union. Lincoln handled Kentucky with “kid gloves” because it had a secessionist governor and a Unionist legislature and was trying to walk a very thin line between secession and neutrality.Īs a result, Lincoln, along with Jefferson Davis, for that matter, wanted to respect its neutrality, at least for the time-being. In terms of maintaining the four border states within the Union, Kentucky represented the greatest challenge for Lincoln, due to its political makeup as well as its constituency. Of the four border states, Delaware was probably the easiest to keep in the Union because of its location and isolation from other Southern states as well as its lack of pro-Confederacy leanings. He believed that, because nearly half of the voters in the North were Democrats who supported a war to preserve the Union but not a war against slavery, he would have to tread lightly on the slave issue or lose their overall support.įurthermore, since the border states had a large contingent of pro-confederate sympathizers, he felt that any quick action to support the anti-slave issue would result in at least three of the four border states seceding from the Union. Lincoln felt that the Union would have to maintain the loyalty of the border states largely for political reasons.
He also had to effectively manage the border states to prevent them from seceding from the Union, a task that required an iron fist as well as kid gloves, depending upon the state involved.įinally, Lincoln also had to worry about keeping other countries, such as England and France, out of the conflict, while he sought a strategy that achieved his aim of reuniting all states under one government. He had to walk a proverbial tightrope between the Republicans and the Democrats, the abolitionists and the slavery proponents, and the Unionists and the secessionists.
Secondly, from a political standpoint, Lincoln also had the daunting task of holding the Union together, in spite of all of the divisive forces prevalent at the time. In other words, he had to recruit, organize, train, feed, clothe, and arm about 3 to 4 men for every soldier the South mustered, roughly 1.5 to 2.5 million men – a daunting task for a country who only had a regular army of about 16,000 men at the time the war began! This situation was compounded by the fact that in order to win, the North had to mass enough men and resources to invade and conquer a territory that was almost the size of Western Europe.
This meant that he had to recruit more troops than the South in order to have superior numbers for invasion. When the South seceeded, Lincoln was faced with the prospect of fighting an offensive war in order to force the Confederacy back into the Union.
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