Well, because it kind of was his job to constrain them. The PResident’s job is, at least in part, to maintain the Constitution’s protection over its lands and people, which included the Confederacy.
To use an example, eastern Tennessee was staunchly pro-Union and almost broke off from its own state the way West Virginia did. How can Lincoln simply abandon those people and their rights as Americans? He would be refusing to do his job in the most egregious manner. There’s an excellent chance that such an approach would have gotten him impeached.
Ah, the old “buy the slaves” approach. It was impossible, I am sorry to say. Compensated emancipation in DC was not remotely a comparable act; there weren’t that many slaves in DC, there was no way for slaveowners to do anything about it if they didn’t like it, and slavery in DC wasn’t the economic and social foundation of society the way it was in places like Georgia and Mississippi.
It is perhaps illustrative that the law set a price for a slave at $300, which was well under the market price at the time; in 1860 the average cost of a slave of any age or health was about $700, with healthy young men costing over a thousand dollars.
Except, it did work, in other countries. And even at a generous full market price, buying out each and every slave in the US would have been cheaper than fighting the war. Plus, you know, no wholesale slaughter, economic devastation, and generations of racial and sectional resentment.
Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri were slaver States that sided with the Union. Does that mean they accepted that slavery would end in their State? Any reason why all these pro-Union slaver States were on the border between the Union and Confederacy?
I’m wondering what fraction of the GPD per capita that represented at the time.
This is all well and good, but it overlooks the whole fact that the Confederacy wasn’t interested in being bought out. Certainly you’re familiar with the Cornerstone speech and the various public figures that state the Confederacy was based on white supremacy and the preservation (and even expansion) of slavery.
So it’s nice to think that they could be bought off, but that wasn’t even a remote possibility.
This is an often claimed and completely nonsensical theory that defies all logic and understanding of the situation.
Economically speaking it’s absurd. The market price of a slave was based on there being an ongoing market in slaves, where slaves were a relatively immobile “trade good.” That is, you sold a healthy young slave for a thousand dollars because you could probably buy one later for a thousand dollars.
If the government announced plans to buy all the slaves, the price would have skyrocketed. This is just common sense, and is borne out by any number of eminent domain examples; if Smith owns a plantation with 20 slaves he’s not going to just up and sell them for $20,000 because then his plantation’s value is gone. He would only sell all of them if he was in a severe liquidity crisis of the plantation has physically failed for some reason. Slaves were largely bought at sold at the margins - you needed one more slave, and someone else needed one fewer - which is of course how this sort of thing usually works. If not, why would he sell all his slaves at the market price? The market price for a capital good, which is how slaves were treated, is more or less by definition less than what almost everyone owns it thinks it’s worth or else all those good would be up for sale. A mass buying program would have either caused the market price to skyrocket or would have by law set the price way, way under what slaveowners would have been willing to accept.
And of course it’s just a ridiculous idea because Southerners wouldn’t have freed the slaves. Not for the market price, and not for twice the market price, and not for three times the market price. Slavery was the bedrock of their economy and social system. A person’s status was in large part determined by how many slaves they owned and those who did not own slaves aspired to. Of course, on top of that, having blacks be free was terrifying to Southerners; Southerners has an almost psychotic fear of free blacks, slave revolts, and generally anything even remotely challenging to white supremacy. Southerners were angry that blacks could be free in the North, and I’m not just talking about the Fugitive Slave Act. When Massachusetts let black people vote, that was a matter that absolutely infuriated Southerners.
Again, I’m looking for options for Lincoln that were possible, not the stuff of steampunk fantasy. Buying out slavery was impossible, full stop. The South would not have agreed to any arrangement and would have seceded had the federal government tried to force the issue in any way. Let us be absolutely clear; to the Southerner, “niggers” were their God-given right to own, and the Northerners were not going to take that away from them.
No, there’d have just had generations of slavery, murder, and rape, not to mention incredible political instability as both the USA and CSA would have further split up and factions of what was once a unified country got into wars over control of contested areas, the West, and on and on. But hey, most of the initial casualties would have been black so maybe that’s better somehow?
So your argument is that if the government wants to buy your property and names a price it wants to pay but you refuse to accept their price, then the government is justified in using military force against you to take your property.
They were divided states where the slave owners were not the majority. In each of those states the slave owners attempted to lead secession movements and join the Confederates but they were outnumbered.
Lincoln tried to convince the governments of these states to enact emancipation programs and offered Federal financial support if they did so. But all four border states refused to abolish slavery on their own.