Border States

American  

plural noun

1. U.S. History. the Slave States of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which refused to secede from the Union in 1860–61.

2. the U.S. states touching the Canadian border.

3. certain countries of central and northern Europe that border on the former Soviet Union and belonged to the Russian Empire: Finland, Poland (prior to 1940), Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

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Example Sentences

Border States None of the states have carried integration quite so far as the District of Columbia, but the six Border States, on the whole, have made heartening progress.

From Time Magazine Archive

They are the cornerstone, the bulwark, among which "bolts" and "splits" and outright transitions occur far less frequently than among the eleven Western States, the eleven Eastern States, the four Border States.

From Time Magazine Archive

He made a clean sweep of the Midwest, the Mountain and Border States, the West Coast, appeared to have lost only Arizona in the Southwest.

From Time Magazine Archive

Smith would have to carry most of the Border States to be within striking distance.

From Time Magazine Archive

But the Border States were as yet debatable ground; they might be retained by conciliation and compromise or alienated by hostile measures, whether directed against them or against the seceded States.

From Baltimore and The Nineteenth of April, 1861 A Study of the War by Brown, George William