during that period into more lasting slavery, the whole would be easier.  I do not wish to pledge the general government to the affirmative support of even temporary slavery beyond what can be fairly claimed under the Constitution.  I suppose, however, this is not desired, but that it is desired for the military force of the United States, while in Missouri, to not be used in subverting the temporarily reserved legal rights in slaves during the progress of emancipation.  This I would desire also.”

Proceeding with its work, the old State convention, which had hitherto made a most honorable record, neglected a great opportunity.  It indeed adopted an ordinance of gradual emancipation on July 1, 1863, but of such an uncertain and dilatory character, that public opinion in the State promptly rejected it.  By the death of the provisional governor on January 31, 1864, the conservative party of Missouri lost its most trusted leader, and thereafter the radicals succeeded to the political power of the State.  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.  At the November election of that year the emancipation party of Maryland elected its ticket by an overwhelming majority, and a legislature that enacted laws under which a State convention was chosen to amend the constitution.  Of the delegates elected on April 6, 1864, sixty-one were emancipationists, and only thirty-five opposed.

After two months’ debate this convention by nearly two thirds adopted an article: