They should simply never had taken it in the first place. Just as slaves should never have been dragged to the U.S. from Africa. We didn’t need a single slave and we don’t need a single illegal today. It’s the merchant class. Always the merchants. How I loathe them.
They did take it in the first place. And then like so many other colonies there was rebellion, and eventually they lost almost the entire colony and managed to get peace with the lease agreement. That’s the problem with taking, the natives frequently don’t want to be taken, and then you have rebellion, which you will always eventually lose.
As for slaves there was no “we”. The Americas were colonized by slave holding countries who supplemented the labor with slaves as they did at home. Ironically of course many of those countries had been conquered by Caesar. So when the slave uprising happened in Haiti they looked at their own history and ended slavery at home, but left it in the colonies.
It’s not the merchant class. It’s government. Government that is too powerful and short sighted. Like Caesar.