[4CJ]

You say compensated emancipation was an option and I would ask how? Ending slavery in any way, shape, or form would have required a Constitutional Amendment. I think that we can both agree on that.

Compensated emancipation could have been offered via Amendment, or simply by federal legislation (as long as slavery was not outlawed). I think many slaveowners would have agreed to that - those that wanted slaves could contine, and those that wanted to emancipate their slaves could do so - without losing a fortune in the process.

The southern states were not about to drop their rebellion and rejoin the Union. Even when Lincoln offered "permanent" slavery. Considering their refusal, that ought to indicate that states-rights were more important.

So the south went to war.

No, Lincoln went to war. He refused diplomatic solutions and compensation for federal property within Confederate territories. Would the US have allowed the British to maintain their forts and garrisions on our property?

All slaves in the areas in rebellion were immediately free, at least legally

No - not legally. Lincoln himself understood his actions to be illegal, and SCOTUS ruled in ex parte Milligan Justice Davis said:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.

If it was illegal before the war, it was illegal during he war. It still took a constitutional amendment.

[4CJ]

I need a new keyboard, to learn HTML, take typing lessons, and use a spell-checker. contine=continue.

[Non-Sequitur]

And had there been a compensated plan, by legislation since a Constitutional amendment would have been impossible to pass, it would have quickly become a scheme to dump older slaves past their working life while keeping the profitable ones. Many slave states had laws against emancipating slaves in general, but against emancipating elderly slaves in particular. This was done not through any sense of altruism but to keep counties from having to deal with elderly free blacks who might be a drain on the county resources. And those who sold off their slaves to the government, what would have kept them from buying younger replacements with the money received? THe only way it would have worked would have been as part of an overall emancipation plan that ended slavery on a set schedule. And that still would have taken a Constitutional amenment. One that never would have passed out of the Senate.