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by potato3732842 246 days ago
You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?

They progressively outlawed slavery over the course of 1870 through 1890 without a civil war. The US probably could've done just about the same over a shorter period (because the US was richer and could have paid its way through a lot of the opposition faced in Brazil).

2 comments

Lincoln favored projects of emancipation with compensation to the slaveholders. In a letter of March 14, 1862, he writes that the paying off all claims in Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri, at $400 per head (his term, not mine) would cost less than the expense incurred in eighty-seven days of war. The project went forward only in the District of Columbia.
> You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?

Brazil had the same Constitution, Senate Rules, and balance of power between slave and free states as the pre-Civil War USA?