<P> Besides formal combat between regular armies, the border region saw large - scale guerrilla warfare and numerous violent raids, feuds, and assassinations . Violence was especially severe in eastern Kentucky and western Missouri . The single bloodiest episode was the 1863 Lawrence Massacre in Kansas, in which at least 150 civilian men and boys were killed . It was launched in retaliation for an earlier, smaller raid into Missouri by Union men from Kansas . </P> <P> With geographic, social, political, and economic connections to both the North and the South, the border states were critical to the outcome of the war . They are considered still to delineate the cultural border that separates the North from the South . Reconstruction, as directed by Congress, did not apply to the border states because they never seceded from the Union . They did undergo their own process of readjustment and political realignment after passage of amendments abolishing slavery and granting citizenship and the right to vote to freedmen . After 1880 most of these jurisdictions were dominated by white Democrats, who passed laws to impose the Jim Crow system of legal segregation and second - class citizenship for blacks . However, in contrast to the Confederate States, where almost all blacks were disenfranchised during the first half to two - thirds of the twentieth century, for varying reasons blacks remained enfranchised in the border states despite movements for disfranchisement during the 1900s . </P> <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>

When was slavery abolished in the border states