Now, we think to put in bills the reimbursement costs from some mandates. At that time, they didn’t. And the mandate that the slaves must be freed didn’t go down well.
The idea that a whole war, with many hundreds of thousands of lives to be lost, was probably not fathomed as being as great as it turned out to be.
I normally think of Ron as a kook, but there is a thread of sanity in this thinking.
The reason Paul is a kook, is that paying the south for their slaves gives undeserved legitimacy to the institition of slavery. Just paying them off and freeing the existing slaves, only helps those slaves that are freed but doesn’t guarantee that the institution itself is destroyed. Also, some slaveholders may not have wanted to sell. The whole system had to be ended, once and for all.