Rockville's Speaker Series Turns to Maryland's 1864 Constitution, the Vote That Abolished Slavery in the State
Psychiatrist and war historian Stephen A. Goldman lectures at Glenview Mansion at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, on the 1864 constitutional election - and on the Union soldiers' ballots that carried a new constitution abolishing slavery in a border state that stayed in the Union. Space is limited.
Maryland abolished slavery not by proclamation but by a vote so close it turned on the ballots of its own soldiers - and that vote is the subject of Rockville's next speaker-series evening. The Peerless Rockville and Glenview Mansion Speaker Series continues at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, at Glenview Mansion, with a lecture by psychiatrist, author and war historian Stephen A. Goldman on Maryland's 1864 constitutional election and the role of Union soldiers' votes in securing approval of the new constitution that abolished slavery. The constitution took effect in November of that year.
The Maryland Goldman will describe was a slaveholding border state that remained in the Union through the Civil War, and it sent about 63,000 soldiers, sailors and Marines into the Union war effort - including 10,000 African Americans. His lecture examines the state at the pivotal moment of the 1864 election, when President Abraham Lincoln faced reelection and, in the city's summary of the talk, the fate of 4 million enslaved people remained uncertain.
Goldman comes to the subject from the veterans' side of the war: he is a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute's board of directors, and the author of 'One More War to Fight: Union Veterans' Battle for Equality through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause', work focused on military veterans and the effects of war. The city notes that space at the mansion is limited for the November 12 lecture.
