WI Southern States compensated for loss of Slaves?

OTL https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context/ In 1833 Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape. The negotiated settlement brought emancipation, and the grant of £20 million in compensation, to be paid by the British taxpayers to slave owners.

Could the Civil War have been avoided if the Southern States had been similarly compensated?
 
Repugnant though the thought of paying slave owners for their "property" is, this may have been the best option in terms of avoiding the civil war and the like. Certainly in Brazil, the two previous proclamations prior to the Golden Act eased the transition, although owners were not paid as such. Even then, it resulted in the revolution and overthrow of the monarchy, so it was an emotive act amongst those that held the power at the time. ie wealthy white slave owners.

There are pros and cons but avoiding a civil war would be no small thing.
 
The problem was not moral repugnance by the North at the thought of paying slaveholders for their slaves. Such repugnance was rare except for a few abolitionists. The problem was that the West Indian experience had convinced the slaveholders (if indeed they needed convincing) that even compensated compensation would be a very bad thing for them, combined with the horror that even many nonslaveholders, especially in the Deep South, felt about a large population of free blacks. And don't forget that of course white Southerners--including the slaveholders--would be paying part of the compensation.
 

jahenders

Banned
No. Even the border states did not accept Lincoln's offer of gradual and compensated emancipation. The idea that South Carolina would accept it is ludicrous.

BTW, it was It was *precisely* the experience of the Jamaica planters which was endlessly cited by white southerners as an example of a class ruined by emancipation despite compensation. I discuss this at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/vY8iBK9dU1c/X-wBRIa49_0J

While I agree that the Southern states wouldn't accept the idea in 1861, I think there is some possibility of it thereafter. Imagine that the South does NOT secede in 1861 and is, instead, faced with a few decades of measures slowly moving against them, the advance of free states out West, and growing UK/French antipathy to slavery and a a slow shift toward other sources of cotton. In this scenario, many Southern states (especially the less slave-dependent ones) might be more willing to accept some compensation instead of facing a more dismal future of slavery potentially being outlawed without compensation. A compensation plan could be a lever for Northern states to change slave states into free states.

For example, Congress might put in place a plan (say 1880) that offers slave states that outlaw slavery compensation of $X per slave for 1881-1882, $X/2 in 1883-1884, $X/4 in 1885-1886, 0 thereafter. Assuming some states take it in those years, the scales will be so heavily against the other slave states that they'll simply lose altogether.
 

jahenders

Banned
I have a hard time seeing Southern elites accepting a slow slide into decline.

Unless they secede, that's the writing on the wall. By 1861 the pendulum had apparently shifted against the slave states -- the primary reason whey they seceded when they did.
 
Unless they secede, that's the writing on the wall. By 1861 the pendulum had apparently shifted against the slave states -- the primary reason whey they seceded when they did.

Exactly, and they didn't accept it. How could you make them short of violence?
 
One of the more crucial problems is the sheer cost of the endeavour.

In 1860 the total value of the 4 Million Slaves in the South was nearly 3 Billion USD.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/
(The retail value of a good field hand at auction was $1200-1400+ ... or about ten time what a CSA private was paid a year)

Which is more than the entire $2.4 Billion Military Budget of the Union for the entire Civil War.
It seems economically unfeasible.
(Also one of the major flaws in many Alt-TL's, especially the not-Stainless Steel Rat one)
 

Cryostorm

Monthly Donor
One of the more crucial problems is the sheer cost of the endeavour.

In 1860 the total value of the 4 Million Slaves in the South was nearly 3 Billion USD.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/
(The retail value of a good field hand at auction was $1200-1400+ ... or about ten time what a CSA private was paid a year)

Which is more than the entire $2.4 Billion Military Budget of the Union for the entire Civil War.
It seems economically unfeasible.
(Also one of the major flaws in many Alt-TL's, especially the not-Stainless Steel Rat one)
In other words the US Civil War is one of those few wars where the war was the cheaper option, damn.
 
In other words the US Civil War is one of those few wars where the war was the cheaper option, damn.

Probably not. You'd need to include the budget of the Confederacy as well, the other budget lines of the Federal government affected by the war, the cost of the economic destruction of much of the Confederate states, and the economic loss of the casualties to the economy as well as any other opportunity costs to determine the real cost of the war to the United States. That is assuredly well over the cost of compensated emancipation.
 

jahenders

Banned
Exactly, and they didn't accept it. How could you make them short of violence?

I think the only way it could have happened is if Southern leaders more or less decided that secession simply was NOT going to work. Then, after years of losing congressional battles, they might feel they have no choice
 
I think the only way it could have happened is if Southern leaders more or less decided that secession simply was NOT going to work. Then, after years of losing congressional battles, they might feel they have no choice

I don't think a violent Civil War is 'doomed' to happen, but I don't think many Americans (North or South) had the vision required to handle the situation.
 
OK, here's an idea that is not exactly "compensated emancipation" but which some Lower South senators feared would amount to something like it for the Border Slave States:

On August 20, 1850, Senator Thomas Pratt of Maryland moved an amendment to Senator Mason's proposed Fugitive Slave Act. It provided that the federal government should compensate slaveholders when Northern hostility made it impossible to return a fugitive under the Act. Pratt's amendment was defeated--about half the Northerners opposed it, the other half abstaining. Because of the abstentions, it could have passed if it had overwhelming Southern support. Pratt prayed that all Southern Senators "would upon this question (although they have upon no other) been found shoulder to shoulder." This did not happen. The Pratt Amendment got strong backing in the border slave states--these states were of course the ones with the greatest risk of losing fugitives to the North. (True, the total number of fugitives was never very large, the census indicating it as about one thousand a year. But the loss of even relatively few slaves could be a serious financial blow--at least to the Border South areas where such losses happened most frequently--given high prices for slaves.) What killed the Amendment was opposition from most of the Lower South's Senators.

Their arguments were interesting. Senator Turney of Tennesee charged that the Pratt Amendment was intended "to emancipate the slaves of the border South, and to have them paid for out of the Treasury of the United States." Turney envisaged border state residents telling their slaves to flee, whitening their region, and enriching themselves. Worse, warned Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, "dishonest masters" might encourage their slaves to run away to get an inflated value for them! Turney, Butler, and Jefferson Davis all thought many border state whites would welcome this "mode of emancipation." Senator Underwood of Kentucky tried to reassure his Southern colleagues that although "many" Kentuckians thought slavery a misfortune and "are anxious to get clear of it", only a "very small minority" would accept emancipation without black removal. While blacks stay, the white Kentuckian would remain "the most ultra southern man you can find on the face of the globe." Davis replied that the Pratt Amendment would result in precisely the black removal and financial compensation to slaveholders that would give Underwood his requisite conditions for deserting the South.

Suppose the Pratt Amendment had passed. (It would be difficult for many Northerners to vote for a measure compensating slaveholders, but let's at least say that more of the Northerners who voted against it in OTL would realize its antislavery potential and at a minimum abstain. Also, let's assume a few more Lower South Senators say, "True, we don't have as many slaves escaping as in the Border South, but we do lose some, and it is difficult to recapture them, so at least our slaveholders should get compensation when loss canot be avoided. Besides, it is an insult to our fellow slaveholders of the Border South to assume that they will do the sort of things Senator Butler suggests.") Two possible effects:

(1) Could the Amendment indeed have undermined slavery in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri (and perhaps have delivered the coup de grace to what little slavery was left in Delaware) as Turney, Butler, and Davis feared?

(2) Northern anger at, and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act (and Southern anger at Northern resistance) was one of the factors intensifying the sectional conflict of the 1850's. William W. Freehling suggested that "Armed with the Pratt Amendment...federal officials might have dampened Northern rage, by not pursuing fleeing slaves within resisting Yankee communities. They could then have eased southern anger, by providing compensation for lost slaves." (*The Road to Disunion: Volume 1, Secessionists at Bay 1776-1854* [New York: Oxford University Press 1990], pp. 504-5) https://books.google.com/books?id=iqdoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA504
 
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