That’s ridiculous and completely illogical. They didn’t just buy the slaves and free them (like the genie from Aladdin, I presume), for the same reason the government doesn’t just buy up all the drugs and destroy them.
(1) A single buyer wanting to clear the market will cause an immedate price-hike, and (2) if you don’t outlaw it, people can just buy more slaves ... and you’re stuck with the same problem, and a precedent of the government buying up illegal goods (which would make the practice profitable).
The war was (partially) about making slavery illegal from then forward ... not just about freeing those slaves that existed at that time. The South would still have objected to the legal change.
SnakeDoc
>(1) A single buyer wanting to clear the market will cause an immedate price-hike, and
Perhaps, but if you’re doing a block-purchase things can become a little more manageable; if the Federal Government had acted through the states as intermediaries it COULD have been feasible. {I.E. In the purchase contract stipulate that the state would not allow Generational Slavery and, perhaps, that all people should be literate.}
>(2) if you don’t outlaw it, people can just buy more slaves ...
Yes... and no. If the slaves were bought out in, say, all but one state... then only that state’s slaves would be “on the market.” And to influx the slaves you would need to a) breed them, b) import them from some [slaving] country, or c) capture foreigners and sell them as slaves. {All three have, historically, been done.}
>and you’re stuck with the same problem, and a precedent of the government buying up illegal goods (which would make the practice profitable).
No necessarily, if you bar Generational Slavery it cuts out all of those who are “born into slavery,” which I believe to be the most hideous aspect of slavery, from being future slaves.
>The war was (partially) about making slavery illegal from then forward ... not just about freeing those slaves that existed at that time. The South would still have objected to the legal change.
Perhaps, but having the advantage of looking backward in time, I think that it would have been best to have let the south secede, passing a Constitutional Amendment baring slave-holding, and then when the CSA petered out its slaving [as would have likely happened] allowed them back into the USA if they wanted it.