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small farms plus the industrial city of Baltimore, where much of the population resented slaveholder control. Federal troops occupied Maryland from the outset of the war. The “great army in blue,” one antislavery leader wrote, brought in its wake “a great army of ideas.” By 1863, with large numbers of slaves enlisting in the army or escaping to Washington, slavery in the state was disintegrating. Maryland Unionists accepted the inevitability of emancipation. But conservatives, headed by Montgomery Blair, hoped to institute a plan of gradual, compensated abolition, while Radicals, led by Congressman Henry Winter Davis, demanded immediate emancipation with no payment to slaveowners. Abolition, Davis insisted, would transform Maryland into a prosperous free-labor society and destroy the domination of “aristocratic” planters over yeomen and urban workers. To owners’ demands for compensation, Davis replied, “Their compensation is the cleared lands of all Southern Maryland, where everything that smiles and blossoms is the work of the negro that they tore from Africa.”55

Blair’s screeds against the Radicals were motivated in equal part by national and Maryland politics. His aim, he explained, was to “get rid of the slavery question in order that we may get at the negro question which lies immediately behind it.” He warned Augustus W. Bradford, Maryland’s governor and a Unionist reluctant to move against slavery, that the only way to “foil [the Radicals’] schemes entirely” was “by taking ground for emancipation.” By seizing the initiative, Blair believed, Maryland could prevent Congress from interfering in post-emancipation race relations. Lincoln tried to remain aloof from the contest between the followers of Blair and Davis, dividing patronage between the two factions and satisfying neither.56

Buoyed by strict loyalty oaths required of voters by the army, Unionists committed to abolition swept the Maryland elections of 1863 and proceeded to call a convention to rewrite the state constitution. In March 1864, shortly before it assembled, Lincoln made his own position clear: “I am very anxious for emancipation to be effected in Maryland,” he wrote to Congressman John A. J. Creswell, noting that this “would aid much to end the rebellion.” Lincoln added that his “preference for gradual over immediate emancipation” had been “misunderstood.” He still thought that gradual abolition would “produce less confusion, and destitution,” but if the convention should “prefer the immediate, most certainly I have no objection.” The main point was for the friends of emancipation not to allow “jealousies, rivalries, and consequent ill-blood” to derail the abolition of slavery.

In April 1864, shortly before the convention assembled, Lincoln traveled to Baltimore to deliver remarks at the opening of the Sanitary Fair (an exposition to raise money for medical supplies and to assist needy and disabled Union soldiers) and to promote the cause of emancipation. He reflected on how the war had revealed the contested nature of the core American value, freedom:

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor….

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one…. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. Recently, as it seems, the people of Maryland have been doing something to define liberty; and thanks to them that, in what they have done, the wolf’s dictionary, has been repudiated.57

In this parable, Lincoln himself was the shepherd; the sheep were