Unionist politician (American Civil War)

Common card · No. 352632

Southern Unionists in the border states organized political parties to oppose secession from the United States during the American Civil War. They extended critical support to the wartime presidency of Abraham Lincoln while remaining outside Lincoln's Republican Party. While some harbored antislavery sympathies, most Unionists viewed the abolitionist movement with hostility and initially resisted Lincoln's efforts on behalf of emancipation. Unionist governments were opposed by Copperheads who opposed Lincoln's wartime policies and in some cases the war itself, as well as Confederate regular and irregular military forces. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election on a platform that called for the exclusion of slavery from the U.S. territories; his election and subsequent efforts to suppress rebellion precipitated the secession of eleven slave states that formed the Confederate States of America. Unionist opposition to secession in the slave states included conditional...

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