Book Review

The impact of southern Unionism on the course of the Civil War has received a great deal of scholarly attention in the past couple of years. A variety of recent works focusing on Unionists as individuals, as families, or as small groups in particular locales have added to our appreciation of the range and impact of anti-Confederate sentiment and activity on the Southern war effort.

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Even so, William W. Freehling argues in this much-expanded version of his Littlefield Lectures at the University of Texas, we have overlooked two of the most significant and sizable groups of southern anti-Confederates—those who lived outside of the Confederacy and those who were not white. Together, slaves and border state residents made up half of all southerners, and their contributions to the Union must also be counted as contributions denied to the Southern cause. Because Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri did not secede, Freehling reminds us, "the war pitted the free labor states plus one-third of the slave labor states against but two-thirds of the slave labor states." Equally significant, the border region's three largest cities—Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis—embraced a larger populace than the fourteen largest cities in the Confederacy. They also denied the South much-needed industrial resources; control of that region would have doubled its factory potential and vastly increased its naval and railroad capacities.

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