"...Slavery? I am tempted to believe that Lincoln was going to do in America what the British had done a generation earlier -- compelling slave-owners to sell their slaves to the federal government which would then release them, and let the freedmen settle in the West...." PB
Nice idea. Lincoln had no practical plan in place, or ever even seriously in the works, for such a monumental thing.
No American Congress would have voted for it, either before or after the Civil War.
No American federal government, back then, could have afforded it, regardless of the terms.
It had been a campaign promise pipe dream from the beginning really.
Freeing the slaves without even transportation, much less compensation, as a war tactic, was The Big Betrayal, a thing American Presidents have always been good at.
Recall that Lincoln's climb to the Presidency itself, through the new betrayer Republican Party, was itself built on deep political party betrayal. The Unexpurgated Lincoln Douglas Debates
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