A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South

Michael D. Robinson is currently an assistant professor at the University of Mobile. This is his first book. It is an outgrowth of a dissertation that he did at LSU under the direction William J. Cooper, Jr. As the subtitle indicates, it is about the secession crisis in the slave states bordering the Mason-Dixon line and the Ohio River. But it is not about all of them. Originally, Robinson intended to focus solely on Kentucky, but then expanded his study to include what he calls the border South. In doing so, however, he excluded the 386,000 Virginians who also lived along the border, the folks who later formed West Virginia. So the book is really about the four slave states that in 1861 remained in the Union—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri