<P> Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the border states . Of the states that were exempted from the Proclamation, Maryland (1864), Missouri (1865), Tennessee (1865), and West Virginia (1865) abolished slavery before the war ended . However, Delaware and Kentucky did not abolish slavery until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified . </P> <P> In the border states, slavery was already dying out in urban areas and the regions without cotton, especially in cities that were rapidly industrializing, such as Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis . By 1860, more than half of the African Americans in Delaware were free, as were a high proportion in Maryland . </P> <P> Some slaveholders made a profit by selling surplus slaves to traders for transport to the markets of the Deep South, where the demand was still high for field hands on cotton plantations . In contrast to the near - unanimity of voters in the seven cotton states in the lower South, which held the highest number of slaves, the border slave states were bitterly divided about secession and were not eager to leave the Union . Border Unionists hoped that a compromise would be reached, and they assumed that Lincoln would not send troops to attack the South . Border secessionists paid less attention to the slavery issue in 1861, since their states' economies were based more on trade with the North than on cotton . Their main concern in 1861 was federal coercion; some residents viewed Lincoln's call to arms as a repudiation of the American traditions of states' rights, democracy, liberty, and a republican form of government . Secessionists insisted that Washington had usurped illegitimate powers in defiance of the Constitution, and thereby had lost its legitimacy . After Lincoln issued a call for troops, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina promptly seceded and joined the Confederacy . A secession movement began in western Virginia, where most farmers were yeomen and not slaveholders, to break away and remain in the Union . </P> <P> Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which had many areas with much stronger cultural and economic ties to the South than the North, were deeply divided; Kentucky tried to maintain neutrality . Union military forces were used to guarantee that these states remained in the Union . The western counties of Virginia rejected secession, set up a loyal government of Virginia (with representation in the U.S. Congress), and created the new state of West Virginia (although it included many counties which had voted for secession). </P>

Map of the southern states during the civil war