“a little known fact is there were slaves in the union especially such states as Maryland and even further North.”
It’s actually a well known fact, although I’d be interested where there were slaves further north than the border states. As best I can tell, slavery was illegal in all the northern states. Being a pragmatist, Lincoln could not free the slaves in the border states or they might have joined the South. The Emancipation transformed the war and allowed slaves who left the South to attain freedom instead of being considered contraband. It was quite obvious that once the war was over, slavery would end, and a constitutional amendment did just that.
True...I was told in my history class...that there were slaves in the North (grandfathered in). This was a Virginian school and taught history at the time with a southern slant...I will look and see if this is even true.Interesting...don’t know the dates-not given...keep looking.
“In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more.”[3]