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The Upper South

The failure to gain the states of the Upper South when they held their secession elections in February 1861 was a major setback for the cause of secession. The seven states of the original Confederacy needed the manufacturing and white manpower of the Upper South, either to convince the North of the futility of military coercion or to be competitive should war break out. Both for its prestige and size, Virginia was the pivotal state that had to be won. As an institution, slavery was stagnant or declining across most of the Upper South, and levels of slave ownership and slaves in the population were roughly half of those in the Lower South. Secessionist appeals for the immediate need to leave the Union to protect slavery failed to gain any majority support. The conservative Whig Party was still very competitive and warned that the cotton Confederacy would push for free trade and the African slave trade, both of which would undermine the more diversified economies in the Upper South. Its leaders rallied non-slaveholders under the banner of conditional Unionism, a commitment to remain in the Union so long as concessions on slavery were granted and the North refrained from any military action against the states that had seceded. Aware of their distinctly minority status and the vulnerability of their slaves given the proximity of the free-labor Northern states, most of the slaveholders in the border slave states clung to the Union as the safest defender of their slave property.