Border states that stayed with the union were thus exempt, but many passed laws abolishing slavery before the civil war ended.
Which does not contradict anything I said. Even in the last days of the war, Lincoln proposed offering return to the Union and compensated emancipation to the seceded states. Even his own cabinet opposed him and he dropped the idea.
Slaves were freed, legally, in a number of ways.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed, over time, the vast majority.
Slaves were freed by state action before the end of the war in MO, MD, WV, TN, AR and LA. Possibly others. Some of these had previously been freed by the EP, and some of the “state governments” involved were puppets of the Union military.
Slaves were freed in KY (abound 50k) and DE (<200) by 13A. But of course slavery had ceased to exist in any meaningful form before then in those states, as there was no functional legal enforcement of the institution.
What 13A really did was to destroy any possibility of the institution coming back. EP freed individuals, it did not destroy the institution, which in theory a state could have brought back any time it chose.
Re: compensated emancipation.
The war eventually cost the federal government roughly $12B, counting pensions, medical care, etc. It cost about $6B over the course of the war.
The South spent something like $3B during the war, not counting the cost of the destruction nor the value of the slaves, which would probably have brought it to something near the Union total or even higher.
All the slaves in the Union, in 1860, were worth something like $3B. Total war cost, something like 8x or 10x that amount. Thus, with hindsight, it would have made a great deal of financial sense to work out a plan for compensated emancipation.
There were, however, multiple problems.
Slaveowners weren’t interested. During the early days of the war, Lincoln repeatedly proposed gradual emancipation to loyal slave sates, with assistance for compensation from the federal government. They repeatedly rejected any such notion.
We need to keep the amounts involved in some perspective. $3,000,000,000 to buy all the slaves versus $60,000,000 in the federal budget of 1860. That’s 50x the federal budget. What would 50x the federal budget be today?
Most of the money for compensation would be paid by northern taxpayers, most of whom considered slavery evil and would be unwilling to pay immense sums in taxes to pay off slaveowners. A very similar reaction to most Americans today rejecting reparations for descendants of slaves.
Nobody expected the war to last so long or cost so much.
Finally, people are odd. They can’t find money to repair a roof or do preventive maintenance on their car, but somehow they always find money (usually in much larger amounts) to repair the damage. That’s pretty much what happened here.
IOW, people aren’t always “logical.” I know that comes as a huge shock to us all!