Home > Border states (Civil War)

In addition, two territories not yet states - specifically the Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma), and the New Mexico Territory (now the states of ArizonaArizona was the 48th state admitted to the United States and is part of the Southwest United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, south and east of the Colorado River, bordering New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California and Mexico. Its major cities ar and New MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the southwestern United States and its U. postal abbreviation is NM . The state's two official languages are English and Spanish. Nuevo Mexico was the Spanish name for the territory north and west of the Rio Grande. USS New Mexico) also permitted slavery but did not leave the Union; yet very few slaves could actually be found in these territories despite the institution's legal status there. Oklahoma is often cited as a "border state" today, but Arizona and New Mexico are rarely if ever so characterized (interestingly, Arizona was the last state to recognize Martin Luther King's birthday as a public holiday).

With geographic, social, political and economic connections to both the NorthThe term the North is often used to refer to the wealthy and technologically advanced nations of the world, as opposed to the South which is poorer and less developed. In some cases the compass direction north is not accurate; Australia is in this sense a and South, the border states were critical to the outcome of the war and still delininate the cultural border that separates the North from the South. After ReconstructionIn the history of the United States, Reconstruction was the period after the American Civil War when the southern states of the defeated Confederacy, which had seceded from the United States, were reintegrated into the Union. Laws and legislation Abraham, most of the border states adopted Jim Crow laws resembling those enacted in the South, but in recent decades some of them (most notably Delaware and Maryland) have become more Northern in their political and social orientation, while others (particularly Kentucky) have adopted a predominantly Southern persona.

Today, the phrase is also sometimes applied in common usage to the states of the upper South, which formed the northern tier of the Confederacy, such as Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina.