The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation did not free Maryland's enslaved people because states that remained in the Union were excluded from its provisions. Slavery in Maryland ended instead through the state's new constitution, adopted on November 2, 1864, by the narrow margin of 291 votes out of almost 60,000 cast. Maryland's voluntary abolition of slavery boosted President Abraham Lincoln's reelection campaign. In Caroline County, loyalties were divided: Union supporters welcomed emancipation, while people with Southern sympathies believed the new constitution had been secured under suspicious circumstances. Albert Gullett, editor of the Denton Journal, charged that the process was full of "outrages and frauds" that disenfranchised at least 1,000 county voters. He asserted that more than half of Caroline County's eligible voters did not try to vote because they feared arrest by Union soldiers, that potential opponents of the constitution were closely interrogated and forced to prove their loyalty, and that many were denied the right to vote. Gullett also claimed that protesters were arrested and that half the votes cast against the state constitution in Denton were deliberately destroyed, an assertion supported by an affidavit signed by 89 men. When county citizens filed legal actions claiming disenfranchisement, a Union general ordered their arrest. Gullett was eventually forced from his newspaper and later committed suicide.