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Thus pressed, Lincoln staked a large part of his 1864 presidential campaign on a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery throughout the United States. Lincoln's campaign was bolstered by votes in both Maryland and Missouri to abolish slavery in those states. Maryland's new constitution abolishing slavery took effect on November 1, 1864. [135]
On January 11, 1865, a state convention approved an ordinance abolishing slavery in Missouri by a vote of 60–4, [6] and later the same day, Governor Thomas C. Fletcher followed up with his own "Proclamation of Freedom". [7] This action effectively marked the end of legal slavery in the state of Missouri.
But in 1860, he was attacked as not abolitionist enough: Wendell Phillips charged that, if elected, Lincoln would waste four years trying to decide whether to end slavery in the District of Columbia. [4] Many abolitionists emphasized the sinfulness of slave owners, but Lincoln did not. [5] Lincoln tended not to be judgmental.
Lincoln also was behind national legislation towards the same end, but the Southern states, which regarded themselves as having seceded from the Union, ignored the proposals. [2] [3] In 1863, state legislation towards compensated emancipation in Maryland failed to pass, as did an attempt to include it in a newly written Missouri constitution.
Missouri was initially settled predominantly by Southerners traveling up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Many brought slaves with them. Missouri entered the Union in 1821 as a slave state following the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in which Congress agreed that slavery would be illegal in all territory north of 36°30' latitude, except Missouri.
(Lincoln, who had received 10.3% of the Missouri vote in the 1860 election, received 70% in the 1864 election.) In 1861, General John C. Frémont had issued an emancipation decree for Missouri. Lincoln rescinded it as a dangerous measure that would alienate unionists in Missouri and Kentucky. In 1862, the convention tried unsuccessfully to ...
Jan. 1, 1863: President Abraham Lincoln announces the Emancipation Proclamation, which frees all enslaved people in the rebellious states of the Confederacy. It does not apply to Kentucky, which ...
The border states of Maryland (November 1864) [16] and Missouri (January 1865), [17] and the Union-occupied Confederate state, Tennessee (January 1865), [18] all abolished slavery prior to the end of the Civil War, as did the new state of West Virginia (February 1865), [19] which had separated from Virginia in 1863 over the issue of slavery.