Viability of program to buy & emancipate slaves gradually in US?

[DominusNovus]

Apologies for the cumbersome title, but this thread I started yesterday in ASB got me to thinking.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-southern-leaders-informed-they-will-lose.516669/

We have discussed various ways to end slavery in the US early plenty of times. When I was formulating that thread, I started contemplating a less ASB version, pondering if the federal government or northern interests could have established a program to buy slaves with the purpose of emancipation in the decades preceding the Civil War. Of course, having a constant stream of buyers would inflate the price of slaves, which would make the planters richer (conversely, it would keep slaves out of the hands of poorer whites, which could have interesting social consequences), and could encourage them to simply breed more slaves. In short, such a program could be very unviable, as the market forces involved would undermine it.

However, that inspired me further, and a new approach occurred to me. After 1808, the only (legal) source of new slaves were existing slaves. More specifically, female slaves of childbearing years. Could either the federal government or northern interests engage in a program to buy and emancipate young female slaves? It would end up being a very gradual program, but could actually see dividends within a relatively short period of time, as slave women seemed to have 4 or more children, generally. If these women are bought and emancipated and brought up north, then the entire slave system will be gradually choked of new slaves and, within a few decades, will have too few healthy young slaves to work on the plantations.

For reference, there were about 1.2 million slaves in the US in 1810, so if we assume 600k female slaves, of whom less than half are likely to be of child bearing age.

 

[Gannt the chartist]

For reference, there were about 1.2 million slaves in the US in 1810, so if we assume 600k female slaves, of whom less than half are likely to be of child bearing age.

Or 16%of the population which would be a big chunk of change even if people wanted to sell. Out of a budget of less than 10m USD, Which will crash when the customs dues do not come in.

 

[DominusNovus]

Or 16%of the population which would be a big chunk of change even if people wanted to sell. Out of a budget of less than 10m USD, Which will crash when the customs dues do not come in.

Only a big chunk if you consider it all happening at once. If we assume such a program (either private or public) buys 3k slaves/year, then that’s around 10% of my estimate of the childbearing or future childbearing slaves each decade (I’m basing this idea on the 1810 numbers just because the program itself should limit future growth).

 

[CastIron]

The entire slave system will be gradually choked of new slaves and, within a few decades, will have too few healthy young slaves to work on the plantations.

This is why plans to emancipate via purchase never really took off. Any sort of reduction of the slave population threatens the power of Southern planters, who were the basis of Antebellum Southern politics. They might see a short-term windfall if they sell, but then they'd have to pay poor whites to replace the free labor they gave up, because they certainly weren't going to sell some of their acres too. Even if it was just slave women, they still worked the fields.

 

[Booster Gold]

Maybe if you paired it with a free womb law like Brazil.

 

[DominusNovus]

Maybe if you paired it with a free womb law like Brazil.

I don’t think that would fly with southern states. The nice thing about this method is it totally dodges all their objections.

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

No viability whatever.

Before the Civil War, abolitionism was very much a minority sentiment. In 1844, 97.6% of Americans voted for slaveowners Henry Clay and James Polk; only 2.3% voted for anti-slavery candidate James G. Birney. "Free Soil" candidates did much better, but "Free Soil" meant the exclusion of slaves from the Territories, not their emancipation in the slave states. Indeed, many Free Soilers wanted the complete exclusion of blacks from the Territories.

Slavery was practiced in several northern states as of 1790, including NY, NJ, CT, and RI. It was ended by laws decreeing gradual emancipation and free birth. But even this was controversial, and most of the slaves were sold south instead of being freed.

In short, almost no one wanted to free slaves, much less pay for it. Note that by 1860, the slave population had an aggregate value of at least two billion dollars, while the entire budget of the US government was only about 70 million dollars.

And most whites found the presence of free blacks in any significant number disturbing. The only general emancipation program to find any support was the colonization movement, which sent a very small number of free blacks "back to Africa".

There was considerable prejudice against free blacks in the north. Illinois had a law barring all free blacks, though it wasn't enforced AFAICT. In New York City, the horse-drawn street cars were segregated until 1854. (In that year, a young colored woman sued the street car company and won; she was represented by future President Chester Arthur.) Working-class Irish immigrants were very hostile to free black competition for jobs.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln found it necessary to assure Illinois voters that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

So I can't see any way that such a program could have been enacted.

 

[DominusNovus]

No viability whatever.

Before the Civil War, abolitionism was very much a minority sentiment. In 1844, 97.6% of Americans voted for slaveowners Henry Clay and James Polk; only 2.3% voted for anti-slavery candidate James G. Birney. "Free Soil" candidates did much better, but "Free Soil" meant the exclusion of slaves from the Territories, not their emancipation in the slave states. Indeed, many Free Soilers wanted the complete exclusion of blacks from the Territories.

Slavery was practiced in several northern states as of 1790, including NY, NJ, CT, and RI. It was ended by laws decreeing gradual emancipation and free birth. But even this was controversial, and most of the slaves were sold south instead of being freed.

In short, almost no one wanted to free slaves, much less pay for it. Note that by 1860, the slave population had an aggregate value of at least two billion dollars, while the entire budget of the US government was only about 70 million dollars.

And most whites found the presence of free blacks in any significant number disturbing. The only general emancipation program to find any support was the colonization movement, which sent a very small number of free blacks "back to Africa".

There was considerable prejudice against free blacks in the north. Illinois had a law barring all free blacks, though it wasn't enforced AFAICT. In New York City, the horse-drawn street cars were segregated until 1854. (In that year, a young colored woman sued the street car company and won; she was represented by future President Chester Arthur.) Working-class Irish immigrants were very hostile to free black competition for jobs.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln found it necessary to assure Illinois voters that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

So I can't see any way that such a program could have been enacted.

I do think this mischaracterizes the nature of the slavery debate in the pre-Civil War era.

First off, just because there was a third party anti-slavery candidate that barely got any vote in 1844 does not speak to the strength of the abolitionist movement itself, but of the priorities of that particular election and the strength of the Democrat and Whig parties. The opinions of the free-soil party members certainly was not favorable to settling the territories with ex-slaves, that is correct. And there were plenty of racist laws in the north, that is also correct. Neither of those facts has any bearing on the prospects of gradual emancipation.

I actually think your estimation of the aggregate value of slaves in 1860 is too low - much more like $2.7 billion. But I'm not talking about the government buying up all the slaves in the country overnight to free them (if you want to have that conversation, that is *exactly* what the ASB thread I linked to in my opening post is about). I'm talking about abolitionists, either in the federal government or private citizens, continually and gradually buying young female slaves.

Just to make things easy, let us assume the following: There are 1.2 million slaves in 1810, and the crude birth rate for the nation -(45-55 births/thousand people) is also accurate for slaves. That means, in 1810, around 30k baby girls are born into slavery. Assuming that the price of such a girl would be roughly half of an adult male slave (see the link below), lets call their price $150/each in 1810 dollars. That means that, to buy and emancipate every girl born into slavery in that year would cost $4.5 million. We can use that as our 'stop growth' valuation - after, roughly, 13 years of this program, you would see the number of slaves being born drop off a cliff, as there would be no more young slave girls to give birth to children born into slavery, and the older women would be increasingly too old or have already passed away. The speed of change would, of course, be impacted by how much higher or lower than that figure.

For sake of simplicity, I went ahead and just ran these numbers as though this program bought every girl when she was born. That is most certainly not how it would be done, if only for the economic fact that it appears that the infant mortality rate among slaves was around 1/3 (meaning the cost of this program could be cut down to $3 million/year). It is also more likely that the program would buy enslaved girls for emancipation at a variety of ages - pretty much whatever ages the owners are selling, with the increased demand for these girls helping entice further sales (which, conversely, would mean the cost to emancipate each individual girl would go up). But I think just keeping things simple helps demonstrate the scope of this idea.

So, for $4.5 million/year (1810 dollars), you'd see, starting around 1823, a very sharp dropoff in the number of slaves being born. By 1840, there would be very few slaves under the age of 17, by 1850, very few under 27, and by 1860, very few under 37 - at that point, we've reached the average life expectancy for slaves in the American South.

http://www2.ku.edu/~kuwpaper/Archive/papers/Pre1999/wp1999_9.pdf

Birth weights and infant mortality among American slaves

The health and mortality of slaves has been widely debated, especially since the publication of Time on the Cross. This paper argues that the living s…

www.sciencedirect.com

Now, whether or not this program would be government run or not, thats a worthwhile discussion. There is nothing stopping well-off abolitionists and their sympathizers from gathering up the funds to do this themselves - the wealth definitely exists. That said, if the federal government were to do this, absolutely no aspect of the program would actually infringe upon the rights of the slave owners. I'm not proposing that the buyers coerce anyone into selling their slaves, but simply to keep buying them at prices that the market will bear.

Even if this program does not explicitly wipe out slavery on its own, it would render it unviable as a continued institution, and, beyond that, by buying up and emancipating the slaves that would go on to give birth to the slaves that would end up working the plantations in the various states west of the Appalachians, could render slavery confined in its influence to the eastern South.

 

[The Tai-Pan]

It would never work.

For one thing, it isn't 2020 where you log on your computer and buy some stocks.

Are you going to have a network of agents in the South at slave auctions? Do you think such a system would even be doable, setting aside the obvious threat of violence? An abolitionist at a slave market is going to be tarred and feathered out of town, at best.

The sums involved are huge, btw. 4.5 million, every year, for decades. And that is just the slave purchase price, not even the administrative fees (which would be gigantic).

The entire idea is a non-starter.

 

[DominusNovus]

It would never work.

For one thing, it isn't 2020 where you log on your computer and buy some stocks.

Are you going to have a network of agents in the South at slave auctions? Do you think such a system would even be doable, setting aside the obvious threat of violence? An abolitionist at a slave market is going to be tarred and feathered out of town, at best.

The sums involved are huge, btw. 4.5 million, every year, for decades. And that is just the slave purchase price, not even the administrative fees (which would be gigantic).

The entire idea is a non-starter.

First off - money is money. Show me any instance of anyone attacking a northerner at a slave auction or who had expressed an interest in buying a slave for the stated purpose of manumitting them. Abolitionists did, in fact, buy slaves to free them, this was not an unheard of thing. What I'm saying is that they would be buying the slaves that generally go for the lowest price.

As for decades, not really. Like I said, 13 years to start seeing an impact on the slave population, assuming they're buying infants. They wouldn't be (especially since nobody would really be selling infants). They'd likely be selling girls of several years old or older, which means you'd see an impact far sooner. Regardless, $4.5 million/year is not an absurd sum. Yes, if the federal government were to do it, that would basically be the cost of the entire US military (at a point when we had a fairly anemic military). But given the scope of the federal government at that time, and how much private wealth there was, it would not be that crazy on its own.

But lets concede it is. What number do you think could be justified?

 

[The Tai-Pan]

But lets concede it is. What number do you think could be justified?

None. I think the fact that no one did it sort of shows it is a non-starter.

I think there is a few basic assumptions underlying the program that cause it to fail.

It is easy to sit here and look at idealized numbers in a frictionless vacuum, but I feel when the rubber hit the road it would be incredibly difficult to nigh-impossible to do on a scale that made any meaningful difference.

 

[DominusNovus]

None. I think the fact that no one did it sort of shows it is a non-starter.

I'm not really sure how to respond to that argument on an alternate history forum.

To your other points, you're not really offering anything specific in objection. I realize these numbers are, as you put it, frictionless. It would never be as simple as I projected, but I specifically called that out as a simplification of the matter to demonstrate the scale.

 

[The Tai-Pan]

I'm not really sure how to respond to that argument on an alternate history forum.

I think the argument is valid. It isn't as if I am pointing an one isolated event or persona nd saying "Impossible to consider otherwise! "

But the abolitionist movement existed for decades and decades in many nations and, as far as I know (but maybe I am wrong) purchasing slaves to free them never really amounted to more then a publicity stunt here or there? It was never anything close to a way to end slavery and, again as far as I know, was never even considered by the dozens of groups and thousands of intelligent, creative individuals who made up anti-slavery.

That probably means something.

 

[Hugh Third of Five]

I do think this mischaracterizes the nature of the slavery debate in the pre-Civil War era.

First off, just because there was a third party anti-slavery candidate that barely got any vote in 1844 does not speak to the strength of the abolitionist movement itself, but of the priorities of that particular election and the strength of the Democrat and Whig parties. The opinions of the free-soil party members certainly was not favorable to settling the territories with ex-slaves, that is correct. And there were plenty of racist laws in the north, that is also correct. Neither of those facts has any bearing on the prospects of gradual emancipation.

I actually think your estimation of the aggregate value of slaves in 1860 is too low - much more like $2.7 billion. But I'm not talking about the government buying up all the slaves in the country overnight to free them (if you want to have that conversation, that is *exactly* what the ASB thread I linked to in my opening post is about). I'm talking about abolitionists, either in the federal government or private citizens, continually and gradually buying young female slaves.

Just to make things easy, let us assume the following: There are 1.2 million slaves in 1810, and the crude birth rate for the nation -(45-55 births/thousand people) is also accurate for slaves. That means, in 1810, around 30k baby girls are born into slavery. Assuming that the price of such a girl would be roughly half of an adult male slave (see the link below), lets call their price $150/each in 1810 dollars. That means that, to buy and emancipate every girl born into slavery in that year would cost $4.5 million. We can use that as our 'stop growth' valuation - after, roughly, 13 years of this program, you would see the number of slaves being born drop off a cliff, as there would be no more young slave girls to give birth to children born into slavery, and the older women would be increasingly too old or have already passed away. The speed of change would, of course, be impacted by how much higher or lower than that figure.

For sake of simplicity, I went ahead and just ran these numbers as though this program bought every girl when she was born. That is most certainly not how it would be done, if only for the economic fact that it appears that the infant mortality rate among slaves was around 1/3 (meaning the cost of this program could be cut down to $3 million/year). It is also more likely that the program would buy enslaved girls for emancipation at a variety of ages - pretty much whatever ages the owners are selling, with the increased demand for these girls helping entice further sales (which, conversely, would mean the cost to emancipate each individual girl would go up). But I think just keeping things simple helps demonstrate the scope of this idea.

So, for $4.5 million/year (1810 dollars), you'd see, starting around 1823, a very sharp dropoff in the number of slaves being born. By 1840, there would be very few slaves under the age of 17, by 1850, very few under 27, and by 1860, very few under 37 - at that point, we've reached the average life expectancy for slaves in the American South.

http://www2.ku.edu/~kuwpaper/Archive/papers/Pre1999/wp1999_9.pdf

Birth weights and infant mortality among American slaves

The health and mortality of slaves has been widely debated, especially since the publication of Time on the Cross. This paper argues that the living s…

www.sciencedirect.com

Now, whether or not this program would be government run or not, thats a worthwhile discussion. There is nothing stopping well-off abolitionists and their sympathizers from gathering up the funds to do this themselves - the wealth definitely exists. That said, if the federal government were to do this, absolutely no aspect of the program would actually infringe upon the rights of the slave owners. I'm not proposing that the buyers coerce anyone into selling their slaves, but simply to keep buying them at prices that the market will bear.

Even if this program does not explicitly wipe out slavery on its own, it would render it unviable as a continued institution, and, beyond that, by buying up and emancipating the slaves that would go on to give birth to the slaves that would end up working the plantations in the various states west of the Appalachians, could render slavery confined in its influence to the eastern South.

No viability whatever.

Before the Civil War, abolitionism was very much a minority sentiment. In 1844, 97.6% of Americans voted for slaveowners Henry Clay and James Polk; only 2.3% voted for anti-slavery candidate James G. Birney. "Free Soil" candidates did much better, but "Free Soil" meant the exclusion of slaves from the Territories, not their emancipation in the slave states. Indeed, many Free Soilers wanted the complete exclusion of blacks from the Territories.

Slavery was practiced in several northern states as of 1790, including NY, NJ, CT, and RI. It was ended by laws decreeing gradual emancipation and free birth. But even this was controversial, and most of the slaves were sold south instead of being freed.

In short, almost no one wanted to free slaves, much less pay for it. Note that by 1860, the slave population had an aggregate value of at least two billion dollars, while the entire budget of the US government was only about 70 million dollars.

And most whites found the presence of free blacks in any significant number disturbing. The only general emancipation program to find any support was the colonization movement, which sent a very small number of free blacks "back to Africa".

There was considerable prejudice against free blacks in the north. Illinois had a law barring all free blacks, though it wasn't enforced AFAICT. In New York City, the horse-drawn street cars were segregated until 1854. (In that year, a young colored woman sued the street car company and won; she was represented by future President Chester Arthur.) Working-class Irish immigrants were very hostile to free black competition for jobs.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln found it necessary to assure Illinois voters that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

So I can't see any way that such a program could have been enacted.

Although he promised to leave slavery untouched in areas where it existed, Lincoln made no secret of his hopes that the institution would end. With that being said, abolitionist sentiment was much smaller and Lincoln's idea of containing slavery in hopes that it would eventually die was far more popular than calls for immediate abolition. Given that Lincoln's much more modest policy of leaving slavery untouched in slave states while preventing its expansion into the territories sparked southern secession, calls for gradual emancipation, either with compensation or by having children of slaves born free would have also resulted in civil war, unless you could somehow get them in before the invention of the cotton gin

 

[DominusNovus]

I think the argument is valid. It isn't as if I am pointing an one isolated event or persona nd saying "Impossible to consider otherwise! "

But the abolitionist movement existed for decades and decades in many nations and, as far as I know (but maybe I am wrong) purchasing slaves to free them never really amounted to more then a publicity stunt here or there? It was never anything close to a way to end slavery and, again as far as I know, was never even considered by the dozens of groups and thousands of intelligent, creative individuals who made up anti-slavery.

That probably means something.

Ok, what does it mean? You can say that it probably means something, but maybe all that it means is that nobody ever considered it. The entire concept - liberate just the girls - does require a certain callous arithmetic to it (full disclosure: I wasn't entirely comfortable with typing every sentence). It also results in effectively segregating across hundreds of miles an entire race by sex - few black women south of the Mason-Dixon line, and few black men north of it. There are implications there that are not exactly pleasant to consider.

In addition to the callousness of it, it would result in a large number of black women that would need to be cared for by someone - I'm guessing the local abolitionist churches would have to step in here, or perhaps it would be the Lowells and their type, the sort that preferred employing young women in their mills, setting up entire company towns for them. Meanwhile, it is quite likely that, where legal, these ex-slave women would end up marrying local white men (among the larger states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and, after 1843, Massachusetts).

 

[Workable Goblin]

I think the argument is valid. It isn't as if I am pointing an one isolated event or persona nd saying "Impossible to consider otherwise! "

But the abolitionist movement existed for decades and decades in many nations and, as far as I know (but maybe I am wrong) purchasing slaves to free them never really amounted to more then a publicity stunt here or there? It was never anything close to a way to end slavery and, again as far as I know, was never even considered by the dozens of groups and thousands of intelligent, creative individuals who made up anti-slavery.

That probably means something.

Gradual and compensated emancipation was used in a number of countries to end slavery, but it never involved just buying the women or just buying the men and freeing them, much less buying children at birth and freeing them right away (if for no other reason than most other slave-owning countries didn't have the rate of natural increase of the slave population that the United States did). Rather, it was always about paying slaveowners to free existing slaves, or saying that future children

As for the proposal itself, I think it falls down on two major points. To begin with, the resources needed are gigantic. You say it would only cost $4.5 million a year, but consider that this is $4.5 million per year in 1810. That is a huge amount of money for the time; $150, the price for a slave you use, is more or less equivalent to the per-capita GDP of the country then. And this amount of resources needs to be sunk into the project year after year for decades to end slavery. No private organization can realistically do that; surges and declines in interest, economic ups and downs, all of those will conspire to make it impossible to keep investing that money. It would have to be the federal government or at least a state government doing it, and that means that you need the planters to acquiesce to slavery being wiped out given the distribution of political power in the United States. But why would they do that? They can make much more money by not abolishing slavery. Compensated emancipation is only something that happens if slavers have enough political and military power that you can't simply abolish slavery in one fell swoop, but not so much that they perceive that they can realistically challenge an abolition if it comes. And there was no point in American history where that was true--the moment that the slavers felt that they had lost enough power that abolition was possible, they immediately and preemptively challenged it before (they thought) their ability to successfully resist abolition was gone.

But let's say that somehow you can find enough abolitionists in the North to subscribe to your emancipation program that you don't need the federal government to be paying for it. Fine, but this actually doesn't remove the need for Southern acquiescence to gradual abolition. The problem is that in this case you have to buy the slaves from a willing owner. You might be able to get away with this for a while, but the slavers, while brutal and callous, weren't stupid; they can put two and two together and figure out that you're buying all of the girl children and shipping them up North and freeing them. Since this is an existential threat to their economic structure--they need the children of those slaves to work the fields!--they have zero incentive to go along with it, even if they're making money in the short term by selling them. In fact, they have every incentive to treat would-be Northern slave emancipators just exactly the same as they treated suspected abolitionists IOTL: terribly. Any Northerner who comes to a slave auction or offers to buy a slave will be looked at seriously askance if not simply thrown out or even killed. Of course you will have defectors who will go ahead and sell slaves for quick cash, but for this plan to work every slaveowner needs to be willing to sell, or nearly every single one, and that simply isn't going to happen.

So basically it's incredibly expensive and unless it's part of a larger government program that probably can't be passed because the South is too powerful and has too many incentives to retain slavery it won't actually work.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

And if you buy 10% of female slaves for sale each year, slave owners will just breed more. Maybe refuse to sell women until they'd produced a couple of kids.... Sounds like it would do nothing to stop slavery and just make slaves' lives even worse than before.

 

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

You're also neglecting that Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Maryland all passed laws forbidding slave owners from emancipating their slaves, which indicates they would probably oppose such a plan.

 

[DominusNovus]

Gradual and compensated emancipation was used in a number of countries to end slavery, but it never involved just buying the women or just buying the men and freeing them, much less buying children at birth and freeing them right away (if for no other reason than most other slave-owning countries didn't have the rate of natural increase of the slave population that the United States did). Rather, it was always about paying slaveowners to free existing slaves, or saying that future children

As for the proposal itself, I think it falls down on two major points. To begin with, the resources needed are gigantic. You say it would only cost $4.5 million a year, but consider that this is $4.5 million per year in 1810. That is a huge amount of money for the time; $150, the price for a slave you use, is more or less equivalent to the per-capita GDP of the country then. And this amount of resources needs to be sunk into the project year after year for decades to end slavery. No private organization can realistically do that; surges and declines in interest, economic ups and downs, all of those will conspire to make it impossible to keep investing that money. It would have to be the federal government or at least a state government doing it, and that means that you need the planters to acquiesce to slavery being wiped out given the distribution of political power in the United States. But why would they do that? They can make much more money by not abolishing slavery. Compensated emancipation is only something that happens if slavers have enough political and military power that you can't simply abolish slavery in one fell swoop, but not so much that they perceive that they can realistically challenge an abolition if it comes. And there was no point in American history where that was true--the moment that the slavers felt that they had lost enough power that abolition was possible, they immediately and preemptively challenged it before (they thought) their ability to successfully resist abolition was gone.

But let's say that somehow you can find enough abolitionists in the North to subscribe to your emancipation program that you don't need the federal government to be paying for it. Fine, but this actually doesn't remove the need for Southern acquiescence to gradual abolition. The problem is that in this case you have to buy the slaves from a willing owner. You might be able to get away with this for a while, but the slavers, while brutal and callous, weren't stupid; they can put two and two together and figure out that you're buying all of the girl children and shipping them up North and freeing them. Since this is an existential threat to their economic structure--they need the children of those slaves to work the fields!--they have zero incentive to go along with it, even if they're making money in the short term by selling them. In fact, they have every incentive to treat would-be Northern slave emancipators just exactly the same as they treated suspected abolitionists IOTL: terribly. Any Northerner who comes to a slave auction or offers to buy a slave will be looked at seriously askance if not simply thrown out or even killed. Of course you will have defectors who will go ahead and sell slaves for quick cash, but for this plan to work every slaveowner needs to be willing to sell, or nearly every single one, and that simply isn't going to happen.

So basically it's incredibly expensive and unless it's part of a larger government program that probably can't be passed because the South is too powerful and has too many incentives to retain slavery it won't actually work.

I'd like to dispute the idea that they're not stupid, but that is another topic for another day.

I don't think the program needs *every* slave owner to sell. It just needs a large enough percentage to seriously dent the growth rate of the American slave population. Not only that, but it also increases the capital costs by placing a floor on the value of female slaves that could render the institution much less economically viable. A slave owner might find it comforting to know that all his female slaves are now, say, twice as valuable on the market. Until he has to buy any - he's still getting the same economic utility out of them for everything other than child birth - a process that doesn't have much return for years.

And if you buy 10% of female slaves for sale each year, slave owners will just breed more. Maybe refuse to sell women until they'd produced a couple of kids.... Sounds like it would do nothing to stop slavery and just make slaves' lives even worse than before.

I'm not sure about that. First off, human beings can't just be bred like livestock, even when those humans are held in bondage. The biology of it just doesn't work out. You can bred a cow every year after her first year, indefinitely until she's hamburger. For people, it is much more difficult. The owners might try to keep their women slaves pregnant, but that risks their very valuable investment. Besides, as I mentioned above, the going price for a young girl was significantly below the price for an adult man, about half. That means that they were clearly willing to part with those slaves pretty readily, and would likely continue to do so for some time.

You're also neglecting that Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Maryland all passed laws forbidding slave owners from emancipating their slaves, which indicates they would probably oppose such a plan.

Did those laws prohibit transporting your property across state lines? If no, then there's nothing they could possibly do about it, legally. And even if it did, the same courts that so often ruled in favor of slaver owners would have to rule against such blatant violation of interstate commerce.

 

[The Tai-Pan]

Gradual and compensated emancipation was used in a number of countries to end slavery, but it never involved just buying the women or just buying the men and freeing them, much less buying children at birth and freeing them right away (if for no other reason than most other slave-owning countries didn't have the rate of natural increase of the slave population that the United States did). Rather, it was always about paying slaveowners to free existing slaves, or saying that future children

As for the proposal itself, I think it falls down on two major points. To begin with, the resources needed are gigantic. You say it would only cost $4.5 million a year, but consider that this is $4.5 million per year in 1810. That is a huge amount of money for the time; $150, the price for a slave you use, is more or less equivalent to the per-capita GDP of the country then. And this amount of resources needs to be sunk into the project year after year for decades to end slavery. No private organization can realistically do that; surges and declines in interest, economic ups and downs, all of those will conspire to make it impossible to keep investing that money. It would have to be the federal government or at least a state government doing it, and that means that you need the planters to acquiesce to slavery being wiped out given the distribution of political power in the United States. But why would they do that? They can make much more money by not abolishing slavery. Compensated emancipation is only something that happens if slavers have enough political and military power that you can't simply abolish slavery in one fell swoop, but not so much that they perceive that they can realistically challenge an abolition if it comes. And there was no point in American history where that was true--the moment that the slavers felt that they had lost enough power that abolition was possible, they immediately and preemptively challenged it before (they thought) their ability to successfully resist abolition was gone.

But let's say that somehow you can find enough abolitionists in the North to subscribe to your emancipation program that you don't need the federal government to be paying for it. Fine, but this actually doesn't remove the need for Southern acquiescence to gradual abolition. The problem is that in this case you have to buy the slaves from a willing owner. You might be able to get away with this for a while, but the slavers, while brutal and callous, weren't stupid; they can put two and two together and figure out that you're buying all of the girl children and shipping them up North and freeing them. Since this is an existential threat to their economic structure--they need the children of those slaves to work the fields!--they have zero incentive to go along with it, even if they're making money in the short term by selling them. In fact, they have every incentive to treat would-be Northern slave emancipators just exactly the same as they treated suspected abolitionists IOTL: terribly. Any Northerner who comes to a slave auction or offers to buy a slave will be looked at seriously askance if not simply thrown out or even killed. Of course you will have defectors who will go ahead and sell slaves for quick cash, but for this plan to work every slaveowner needs to be willing to sell, or nearly every single one, and that simply isn't going to happen.

So basically it's incredibly expensive and unless it's part of a larger government program that probably can't be passed because the South is too powerful and has too many incentives to retain slavery it won't actually work.

Thanks for putting this better then I tried to.