Maryland, as a slave-holding border state, was deeply divided over the antebellum arguments over states' rights and the future of slavery in the Union. Culturally, geographically and economically, Maryland found herself neither one thing nor another, a unique blend of Southern agrarianism and Northern mercantilism. In the leadup to the American Civil War, it became clear that the state was bitterly divided in its sympathies. There was much less appetite for secession than elsewhere in the Southern States (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Alabama Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee) or in the border states (Kentucky and Missouri), but Maryland was equally unsympathetic towards the potentially abolitionist position of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. In the presidential election of 1860 Lincoln won just 2,294 votes out of a total of 92,421, only 2.5% of the votes cast, coming in at a distant fourth place with Southern Democrat (and later Confederate general) John C. Breckinridge winning the state. In seven counties, Lincoln received not a single vote.