Border States

The term border state is often used in a political context. Yet most popular dictionaries or encyclopedias do not have an entry under that term. And if a definition is found elsewhere, it is likely to differ from one found in another source.

Originally there were four border states: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Although they were slave states, they did not secede from the Union and they fought on the northern side in the Civil War. When the western counties of Virginia split off and became the state of West Virginia in 1863, a fifth border state was created.

All five technically were southern states because they were below the Mason-Dixon line, the generally accepted demarcation between the North and the South. Surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon established the line in the 1760s as the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. But the five states came to be called border states rather than southern states because of their proximity to the Confederate border and their loyalty to the Union.

Over the years political scientists, geographers, and statisticians have altered the list of what they consider to be “border states.” The U.S. Bureau of the census, however, does not use the border state classification. It divides the fifty states into four regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West) and further divides each of those into two subregions, except for the South, which has three subregions. Under the Census Bureau grouping, the five original border states are listed under the South except for Missouri, which is under Midwest.

Congressional Quarterly, the Gallup poll, the New York Times/CBS News Poll, and other organizations also define four regions of the country, but without subregions.

For their party competition table in Vital Statistics on American Politics, political scientists Harold W. Stanley and Richard G. Niemi define border states as the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. But for a school desegregation table they cite another source that adds Delaware to the same list.

In Vital Statistics on Congress, 1997–1998, political scientists Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann, and Michael J. Malbin define border states as Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

Another political scientist, Larry Sabato, defines border states in his book Goodbye to Good-time Charlie: The American Governorship Transformed as Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Oklahoma, which appears on three of these lists, did not become a state until 1907.