Thanks to Brooks Simpson for reminding me today is sesquicentennial of emancipation in Missouri. Missouri was the second of two loyal slave states that ended slavery by state action during the Civil War (Maryland ended slavery on Nov. 1, 1864). Kentucky and Delaware refused and slavery didn’t end in those places until the ratification of the 13th Amendment because the four aforementioned loyal slave states had been exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation.
We know that January 1865 was an important month in the history of the destruction of slavery in the United States. After all, it was in that month that the House of Representatives joined the Senate in passing the Thirteenth Amendment, which aimed to complete the eradication of chattel slavery in the nation.
In Missouri, however, representatives of the Show Me state had beaten Congress to the punch. On January 11, 1865, Missourians led by Charles Drake terminated the peculiar institution. Among those slaves now recognized as formally free, by the way, were the slaves of Colonel Frederick Dent, Ulysses S. Grant’s father in law. As the colonel apparently never transferred official title of any of his slaves to his daughter Julia, the correct date for the end of slavery in the Dent family is January 1865 (not the misguided claims that Grant had slaves after the war or…
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