Passionate speeches filled Courthouse Square on September 24, 1864, as Montgomery Blair, Abraham Lincoln's first postmaster general, and other speakers urged Marylanders to vote to outlaw slavery in the state in an upcoming statewide referendum. Frederick's voters responded by supporting the new Maryland constitution on October 12-13 by a vote of 735 to 441. The statewide abolition referendum passed, and enslavement ended in Maryland on November 1, 1864. That vote was critical because although Lincoln had introduced the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, it freed only enslaved people living in Confederate-held territory, and Maryland remained in the Union, so enslaved people there remained in bondage. Even after the 1864 vote ended slavery in Maryland, the fight for equality and citizenship for 3,000 newly freed people in Frederick County was far from finished. At this same square, the wooden courthouse burned after a political rally in May 1861, Confederate soldiers used the unfinished basement of the new brick courthouse as a guardhouse during their September 1862 occupation of Frederick, and in October 1862 Lincoln passed by on his way to visit a wounded Union general recuperating on neighboring Record Street.