It doesn't seem talked about very often, but there were actually quite a handful of various Southern Republicans in Missouri, Virginia, and Southern-born Republicans in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. People talk about how in Missouri the main Unionists in the early days were immigrants in St. Louis, but actually, all the leaders of the Republicans in St. Louis were Southerners born into slaveholding families. The Republican Party itself was started by a Southern slave owner. They wanted to see slavery gradually end, but they weren't abolitionists as such. Seems like an understudied group. The St. Louis Junta was literally all Kentuckians.

People like to portray the Civil War as a lot more white and black (kek) than it really was. There was a lot more nuance than popular retellings tend to allow for.

Fun fact: Lincoln had a low-class Southern hillbilly accent, attended a Baptist church growing up, and was married to a Southern aristocrat planter from Lexington KY who had brothers & cousins in the Confederate military despite leading the Union in the Civil War.