With Lincoln having issued preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Unionists in Tennessee and southern Louisiana undertake to organize congressional elections so as to gain exclusion from the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Lincoln encourages southern Unionists – and provides them military assistance – in their efforts. Lincoln’s Annual Message in December 1862 puts forward compensated abolition plan, providing for abolition in the rebellious states. Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, but exclusion of Tennessee and southern Louisiana do not comport with specifications in the preliminary version. Exclusions will provide opportunity for proslavery Unionists to salvage slavery, but proclamation also raises issue of how fate of slavery will factor into restoring rebellious states to the Union.

The success of the Federal military campaigns at Vicksburg and Port Hudson (Louisiana) give the Union control of the entire Mississippi River and alter the course of the war. The campaigns also bring about the first substantive combat experience of black soldiers in the war. Tennessee Unionists hold a convention in July 1863 that precipitates the split between free-state and conservative Unionists. In Louisiana, conservative Unionists petition Lincoln to recognize their efforts to organize a loyal, proslavery government, but Lincoln rejects the proposal. Free-state Unionists in Louisiana also develop plans for restoring the state predicated on abolishing slavery.

The secession crisis of 1860-61 in the lower Mississippi valley represents the crisis in the South as a whole. Secession is more contentious, and southern Unionism more prevalent, in Arkansas and Tennessee than in Louisiana and Mississippi. Support for secession initially corresponds to areas of plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings, but the Confederacy receives overwhelming white support after secession. Events outside the region shape the Union’s initial approach to the rebellion and to the problem of fugitive slaves, though the region also experiences internal disruptions in mobilizing for war. The lower Mississippi valley initially experiences little direct effect from the war, but control of the Mississippi River soon becomes central to Union strategy. By early 1862, preparations were underway for Federal incursions into the region. Although the issue of slavery becomes unavoidable, notions of “Reconstruction” remain limited, and few Northerners envision a reunion predicated on the abolition of slavery.

During second half of 1862, Unionists – including slaveholders – in the occupied lower Mississippi valley organize politically, with assistance from Federal military authorities. By July, Lincoln has already decided to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, and his frustration with the failure of Unionists in Louisiana to act influences his thinking. Lincoln issues preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September, spelling out requirements for Confederate areas not to be declared in rebellion. Federal military forces establish contraband camps for fugitive slaves, but also express fears of former slaves becoming dependent of government support; they also implement systems of wartime free labor on plantations under military oversight.

The Epilogue explores the impact of competing cultures of violence on secession and the coming of the Civil War. The collapse of the Fugitive Slave Act convinced many in the South that slavery could no longer be preserved within the Union. The rendition of Lucy Bagby from Cleveland, OH, in 1861 marked an attempt to conciliate the South by rebuilding a national consensus on the normativity of proslavery violence. The public condemnation of the Republican officials who returned Bagby to slavery, along with the party’s rejection of compromise measures, demonstrated that this consensus could no longer be restored. For many in the North, the violence of mastery was a moral horror that they were determined to repudiate. For white Southerners, however, the violence of mastery lay at the heart of their understandings of identity and membership in the national community. The violence of mastery also shaped the manner in which the South approached separation from the North, producing acts of aggression and demands for submission during the secession winter of 1860–1861. The Civil War was thus in part the product of an irreconcilable conflict in the cultural perception of violence.