a law permitting the local option, which would let individual counties in the state chose whether to enact prohibition of alcohol within their borders, but it did not pass. That year he was elected to a four-year term in the Maryland Senate. He resigned part-way through his term, in 1858, to practice law in Baltimore. Two years later, he married Ellen Young Guiteau, daughter of a Congregational minister. By 1864, Daniel had joined the Republican Party. That year, he was a delegate to the state's constitutional convention, which produced the Maryland Constitution of 1864. Despite growing up in a slaveholding area, Daniel was an abolitionist and joined with the majority at the convention in voting to outlaw slavery and disenfranchise those who had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. In 1866, Daniel argued in court that state laws enforcing racial distinctions were no longer valid after the passage of the recent federal Civil Rights Act. The court ruled in his favor, holding that the law could not treat black and white apprentices differently. Later that year, Daniel ran unsuccessfully for a judgeship on the state equity court. Prohibition advocate After the war, Daniel continued in his private law practice while remaining active in the anti-alcohol cause. He was elected president of the Maryland Temperance Alliance when it was formed in 1872. He was re-elected to that position annually for the next twelve years. During that time, the local option law Daniel favored while in the legislature became law; thirteen of the state's twenty-three counties (including Somerset) adopted prohibition under the statute. Throughout his leadership of the Maryland Temperance Alliance, Daniel remained a member of the Republican Party, but in 1884 he left to join the small Prohibition Party. Like Daniel, most party members came from pietist churches, and most were former Republicans. Elected as the head of the Maryland branch of the party, he attended the 1884 Prohibition Party National Convention in Pittsburgh. After being selected as temporary chairman of the convention, the delegates chose Daniel to be nominated for vice president alongside the presidential nominee, John St. John. The party platform was silent on most issues of the day, focusing instead on the alcohol problem. In the election that year, the Prohibition ticket fell far short of victory, as expected, but placed third with 1.5 percent of the vote—a marked improvement over the 0.1 percent the 1880