Seriously, I don’t think that flies.
Slaves were very visible, especially on big farms. You couldn’t avoid being noticed.
And I think feds would’ve been alot more keen on illegality then than now. While I can imagine many looking the other way, it just isn’t the same as illegal aliens now who really can go undercover - all on their own. They can pop in and pop out, not stay in a cabin on someone’s property.
In that imaginary world, they would have had to abolish slavery first. But the south didn’t want to abolish slavery, they wanted to expand it into the territories. But if you could somehow get them to abolish slavery and had millions and millions of dollars so you could buy up every single slave all at once, then maybe it might have worked.
We have to remember though, in the real world, not the imaginary world, but in the real world, a lot of them got away with coming up north, stealing free blacks and dragging them down south to be sold and lost among the slave population. So since that was done in the real world and they got away with it and families never saw their loved one’s again, then that would have to be taken account as well in the imaginary world.
Think elite democrats, only really bad on steroids. democrats don’t ever want to give up an once of control over people’s lives. Those democrats were not about to abolish slavery on their own. Shoot, I read that they not only wanted to expand slavery into the territories but that some held the belief that slavery should be expanded to include poor and uneducated whites as well.
Just look at today’s democrats for a lite example. How they’ve treated the American people. How they looked down their long elitist noses, turned their backs and refused to listen, called the people names like Nazi, made unfounded accusations of racist acts, so they could steal some of our freedom with their job killing health & tax bill.