Let me ask you this then: if it would be so easy to keep slaves illegally, why didn’t the South keep the slave system up and running after the war? Why isn’t it still going in the South now? After all, if buying all the slaves and freeing them wouldn’t have prevented slavery, why did killing half a million people in a war and then freeing the slaves stop slavery?
Ummm excuse me, but we were talking about a what if, that would have happened before the war. Not after.
Remember? A what if they brought in slaves illegally to replace those that would have been sold as in Paul’s idea?
But if you want to ask about after, then I would assume that it would be because they lost the war and the northern solders were there for a few years during the reconstruction.