At the presidential election of 1864, that party
chose a new State convention, which met in St. Louis on January 6, 1865,
and on the sixth day of its session (January 11) formally adopted an
ordinance of immediate emancipation.
Maryland, like Missouri, had no need of reconstruction. Except for the
Baltimore riot and the arrest of her secession legislature during the
first year of the war, her State government continued its regular
functions. But a strong popular undercurrent of virulent secession
sympathy among a considerable minority of her inhabitants was only held
in check by the military power of the Union, and for two years
emancipation found no favor in the public opinion of the State. Her
representatives, like those of most other border States, coldly refused
President Lincoln's earnest plea to accept compensated abolishment; and
a bill in Congress to give Maryland ten million dollars for that object
was at once blighted by the declaration of one of her leading
representatives that Maryland did not ask for it. Nevertheless, the
subject could no more be ignored there than in other States; and after
the President's emancipation proclamation an emancipation party
developed itself in Maryland.
There was no longer any evading the practical issue, when, by the
President's direction, the Secretary of War issued a military order,
early in October, 1863, regulating the raising of colored troops in
certain border States, which decreed that slaves might be enlisted
without consent of their owners, but provided compensation in such
cases.
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