The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [176]
Over the objections of delegates who proclaimed it “robbery,” the convention abolished slavery immediately and prohibited the legislature from compensating the former owners. Reflecting the shift in political power that had taken place, it reapportioned the legislature to reduce the power of the plantation counties, established the state’s first free, tax-supported school system, and limited voting to those who took a loyalty oath far more stringent than the one Lincoln had included in his Ten Percent Plan. But only a handful of emancipationists demonstrated any concern for the fate of the state’s 80,000 slaves. The school system excluded their children, and suffrage was limited to whites.58
In the fall of 1864 Lincoln urged Maryland voters to approve the new constitution. They did so on October 13 by the narrowest of margins, 400 votes in a turnout of 60,000. On the day before the election, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Marylander, died. Many Republicans shared the reaction of George Templeton Strong, the opinionated New York diarist: “Two ancient abuses and evils were perishing together.” On November 1, the day the constitution went into effect, Lincoln addressed a group of blacks who paraded to the White House. “It is difficult to realize,” he remarked, “that in the state, where human slavery has existed for ages…the soil is made forever free.” He urged former slaves to “improve yourselves, both morally and intellectually.” The air of celebration, however, was soon dispelled as Maryland’s courts assigned thousands of black children, against the vociferous objections of their parents, to labor under long-term indentures for their former masters in a blatant attempt to continue planters’ access to unfree labor.59
The other border state to experience wartime reconstruction was Missouri, whose Unionists remained even more hopelessly divided than Maryland’s by what Lincoln called a “pestilent factional quarrel.” Conservatives pressed for gradual, compensated emancipation and lenient treatment of Confederates; Radicals for immediate abolition and the disenfranchisement of rebels. Each group bombarded Lincoln with complaints about the other. Lincoln sought without success to reconcile them and expressed exasperation with their ongoing feud. He had been “tormented…beyond endurance” by Missouri factionalism, he complained at one point. “Neither side pays the least respect to my appeals to…reason.”60
In June 1863 the Missouri state convention, which in 1861 had become a rallying point for Unionists against the pro-secessionist legislature, reassembled and adopted a plan of gradual emancipation that would not begin until 1870. As a form of nonmonetary compensation, elderly slaves would remain in bondage for life and young ones would work as indentured servants until the age of twenty-three. As the delegates deliberated, General John M. Schofield, the military commander in Missouri, asked for instructions. Lincoln replied by reiterating his belief that “gradual can be made better than immediate for both black and white, except when military necessity changes the case,” but that the delay before abolition took hold should be “comparatively short.” Missouri slaves, however, did not desire to wait seven more years for freedom. “The slaves are leaving by hundreds every day,” James S. Rollins, one of the state’s congressmen, reported. The “self-emancipated ‘chattels,’” quipped a Kansas City newspaper, “seem to prefer emancipation without compensation.”61
Missouri Radicals now launched a campaign for immediate emancipation. In September 1863 the Radicals sent a seventy-man delegation, headed