Slavery was not native to Maryland: save for indentured servants, who worked for a time as a condition of repayment of loans, for thirty years after the state’s founding there were no laws regarding slavery. The state’s growing tobacco crop changed that rubric, and slavery provisions were brought into law. Despite the wide cultural acceptance, a number of groups, including Quakers, Methodists, and the Maryland State Colonization Society, which created a short-lived Republic of Maryland in Africa, next to Liberia, continually opposed slavery. They were helped along by the Civil War to bring about their dream.

On this day, October 11, in 1864, the Maryland legislature officially abolished slavery. In some ways, it was only an official approval of the conditions already on the ground across the state.

The federal government of the U.S. passed a number of laws allowing freedom for slaves. Any of them joining up with the Union Army would be free at the end of their service, and the Army likewise absolved itself of the responsibility of returning runaway slaves within their ranks. Effectively, this stopped the practice of auctioning of slaves in Maryland — one of the nails in the coffin. The last one would come with President Lincoln’s passage of the Emancipation Proclamation.