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New Jersey was the most reluctant non-border state with respect to supporting the Union cause. Slavery lasted longer there than in any other state north of the Mason Dixon line. It was a Copperhead stronghold and elected George McClellan, whom Lincoln found insufficiently zealous as a military commander, and who ran as a “peace” candidate for President in 1864, as governor. New Jersey did not ratify the 14th Amendment. School segregation was allowed by local option until about 1950. While not settled by Southerners, as were the southernmost counties of Illinois, Indiana, or Ohio, many of the descendants of pre-colonial English and Dutch settlers, unless they were of New England Puritan stock, were sympathetic to the states rights arguments of the Confederacy. Obviously, New Jersey's economic and geographic interests were not with the South.