Matt Yglesias had a thoughtful response, which you should read. I’ll try to write more about this in the future, but the main problem I have with discussions like this is that they don’t really take into account the strategies of the interests over the longterm.  The GOP had a murky but discernable plan for how they were going to attack slavery after they captured the government  in 1861: absolutely and completely bar any new slave states (this had already been effectively accomplished when the LeCompton Constitution was brought down); admit Kansas as a free state; begin building a loyal following among non-slaveholding whites in the border states through the use of patronage and uncensoring of the mails; and pass the Homestead Act to begin populating the west with anti-slavery freeholders. Likewise, the southerners had a plan for how they were going to deal with aggressive GOP anti-slavery tactics: they would withdraw from the union, even if it meant war.

The short-term goal of the anti-slavery movement was to bring down slavery in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and maybe Kentucky, all of which were already suffering from the economic problems endemic to mobile slave labor: slaves were being drained out of the border states toward the deep south, where they were worth more and escaped less. In addition, the border states seemed structurally ripe for an anti-slavery political assault. Delaware, for instance, had relatively few slaves; Missouri already had a functioning anti-slavery party in the state. Once slavery was defeated in the border states, not only would there be greater anti-slavery majorities in Congress (23 to 11 states if you count Kansas, and tantalizingly close to the 3/4 needed for the Constitutional amendment), but the economic problems of border-state slavery were going to then come to Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia. There were optimist in the GOP who thought they could flip one or two border states by 1864, and the rest perhaps by the close of the decade.

This is one reason the secessionists were in such a hurry to leave the union in the winter of 1861; if the GOP got its executive branch party patronage game going in the south, the window might itself close on the very possibility of secession, and certainly on the practical possibility of a successful confederacy. It is sometimes disguised by the way the history is taught, but the South was not particularly afraid of Congress — they knew well how to lock the legislature up, and starting in 1850 they more or less gave up on the idea of maintaining the balance rule. During the decade they traded new free states and territories (California, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas/Nebraska/Utah/New Mexico) not for slaves states, but for other tangible benefits: a stronger fugitive slave act, an implicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the principle of possible slavery in the southwest. Heck, as I’ve written before, they defeated the GOP in 1859 in order to bring a free Oregon into the union, simply because it was possibly a Democratic state. All of this pointed to their real fear: the GOP capturing the executive branch and being able to dangle patronage jobs over the heads of the non-slaveholding whites in the south.

And so I think talk of compensated emancipation sometimes misses the mark. If the GOP had been given the peacetime opportunity to undertake it, they would have certainly just focused it on the border states — in the sense that they really didn’t need the cooperation of the deep south, just enough states to get the snowball rolling and eventually  flip the calculus of consent on an amendment barring slavery — and let the natural flow of things kill off slavery in the deep south. But the deep south would have likely had the same reaction to peacetime compensated emancipation as they did to the GOPs actual political plan: they would not have waited around. Instead, the Gulf State Confederacy would have (ast they did) forced the upper South to choose between Union and Confederacy before any such plan would have had a chance. So the question is not about whether compensated emancipation was possible, it’s about whether it could have been undertaken at some price level that both (a) convinced the border states it was worth it and (b) did not push the Gulf States into secession. I don’t believe such a price point existed.

I will absolutely write more on this later, the topic of political strategy on the eve of the war absolutely fascinates me.