Pennsylvania during the American Civil War

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

A discussion in another thread prompted me to ask about this.  Do any Pennsylvanians (or otherwise, anyone with a decent knowledge of history) know about Pennsylvania's role during the Civil War?  It's been said that outside of Philly and Pittsburgh, PA is almost an entirely different state, culturally and politically ('Alabama in the middle,' as James Carville once famously described it).  Do these cultural differences stem from any possible divides during the Civil War, or was PA pretty much a unified pro-union/anti-slavery state?

[Dr. Cynic]

Well, here in Western PA, Greene County almost joined the confederacy, other than that, the state was always fairly loyal and at the time there weren't many sympathies with the south.

Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are themselves entirely different sorts and I don't really feel as though people here in Pittsburgh view Philly as "brothers". I would be willing to bet that Pittsburgh feels a greater kinship with cities like Detroit, Cleveland (except in football, obviously), even Chicago. I'm sure Philadelphia feels that same feeling with more east coast cities. Pennsylvania itself has always been divided between east and west culturally, though Pennsylvania itself was mostly united in the Civil War. Our differences, I think, stem further back than that.

[Bleeding heart conservative, HTMLdon]

Breckenridge did better in PA than in any other Non-border state - in fact he performed better in PA than in KY or MO.  Not sure how that affected loyalties when the war actually started.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

When some of the raiders at Harpers Ferry were escaping back through Pennsylvania, they were going through some rather hostile country in south central PA, where a heavy concentration of people were serious about enforcing the fugitive slave act. Some of the usual suspects from these operations, formed posses to track these attackers down and one of them got captured by such a group when he made the foolish mistake of returning to his house in this area. He also had a pistol that he had stolen from Lewis Washington that had belonged to George Washington back in the day. A literal smoking gun.

Other parts of rural central PA were very much pro-North, especially towards the New York border. Counties like Tioga gave Lincoln over 70%.

[barfbag]

Pittsburgh is a lot more like the Midwest while Philadelphia fits in with the Boston-Washington D.C. corridor. Western PA has become more conservative recently while eastern PA has slowly and slightly drifted to the left.

[stevekamp]

Kevin Phillips in The Cousins Wars argues that before the rise of industrialism in the 1850s, Pennsylvania was a northern version of Virginia without slaves.  In The Emerging Republican Majority, Phillips notes pro-Confederate activity in Philly and in the Poconos.

The Republican Party turned the 1856 loss into a string of 1860-1932 wins (losing only 3 offices and never the Pres) by fusing with the American Party and becoming the party of urban Pennsylvania.  Dems were mostly rural before 1934, when the Republican Machine collapsed.

[J. J.]

I just wrote an article on Harrisburg during the Emergency of 1863.  Simon Cameron had broken with Lincoln and was of minimal help.  One of the leading newspapers, the Patriot and Union was a Copperhead publication.

Lincoln's call for 50,000 militia netted 7,000, and that was only because they started permitting blacks to join. 

I have heard that Lincoln lost Dauphin and Cumberland Counties.

[J. J.]

I was cecking something tonight.  Mercersville, in Franklin county, produced 33 to 88 troops for the 54th MA.  The Cumberland Valley had a large African American population.