Maryland's 1864 Abolition: Three Hundred Seventy-Five Votes

By the fall of eighteen sixty-four, the Civil War had been going for three and a half years and Maryland was still a slave state that had stayed in the Union. Approximately ninety thousand enslaved people lived within its borders. The state was holding a referendum on whether to adopt a new constitution that would abolish slavery before the federal government required it to do so. Both outcomes were possible. Nobody knew which way it would go.

The vote was held on October twelfth. When the final count was certified and posted, the margin was three hundred seventy-five votes: thirty thousand one hundred seventy-four in favor of the new constitution, twenty-nine thousand seven hundred ninety-nine opposed. Abolition passed. It became effective October twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, more than a year before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified nationally.

What the margin conceals is how divided the electorate really was. Maryland civilians voting at home polling places rejected the new constitution by a wide margin. It was the vote of Maryland soldiers serving in the Union army, who favored abolition by more than nine to one, that carried the final count into the yes column. Had the soldier vote not been counted, the referendum would most likely have failed. The state that freed itself from within did so by the thinnest possible thread.

Frederick Douglass returned to Maryland the following year. He spoke at the Bethel AME Church in Baltimore, which had been founded in eighteen sixteen by Daniel Coker, a formerly enslaved man who had once taught Douglass when both were in Baltimore. The building that had been illegal when Douglass learned to read in it was now, in eighteen sixty-five, the platform from which he could speak.