Turtledove's gradual phase-out of slavery attempted earlier?

In his novel The Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove had the South win the Civil War. And then, Robert E. Lee ran for and won the presidency of the Confederacy. He proposed the following as a phase-out:

Abolitionists could put their money where their mouth was. If a society of abolitionists or an individual abolitionist wanted to free a particular slave, a qualified appraiser would set the price of the slave, and the current owner would be duty-bound to accept this price.

What if something like this was tried earlier, say, like 1820?
 

Saphroneth

Banned
In his novel The Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove had the South win the Civil War. And then, Robert E. Lee ran for and won the presidency of the Confederacy. He proposed the following as a phase-out:

Abolitionists could put their money where their mouth was. If a society of abolitionists or an individual abolitionist wanted to free a particular slave, a qualified appraiser would set the price of the slave, and the current owner would be duty-bound to accept this price.

What if something like this was tried earlier, say, like 1820?
The sheer value involved makes it infeasible in practice. It was a fair fraction of the US GDP in 1860. (Estimated market value of slaves is approx. 2.7 billion dollars where the whole US GNP was 4.2 billion.)

See:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030701...story.com/essays/MusingsAmericanCivilWar.html
which looks at what that means in real terms.
 
http://web.archive.org/web/20030701...story.com/essays/MusingsAmericanCivilWar.html

' . . . First, emancipation with full compensation to the slave owners would actually have been considerably cheaper than fighting the civil war in total, but it would not be much cheaper for either party individually to fund emancipation rather than fight. Second, nobody really expected the civil war to cost nearly that much, so even from a purely “economic” calculation both sides would prefer to fight rather than pay for emancipation, and the Southerners had no reason to agree to emancipation unless fully compensated (in fact, because of what they would perceive as “social costs”, they would be unlikely to agree to emancipation even if paid the market price for all slaves). . . '
So, we drift towards a civil war anyway
 
Now, from the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler, I took the idea that the worse part of slavery, as horrible as things like being whipped were, was actually the split up of families. So, as abolitionists got better and smarter and more experienced, they would likely use money to keep families together and/or prevent split ups. And thus, some good would be done.

And just the effort to try . . . maybe each side would work together a little more. Admittedly, this is an optimistic possibility, but sometimes this kind of stuff has gotten rolling in human history.

Since agriculture is one important base of society, there is a rational basis for favoring it in laws. Plus, maybe a more realistic understanding by people not involved in agriculture of the substantial ups and downs it faces. I continue to think it's somehow possible to move beyond slavery earlier.
 
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