Not only was a plan of gradual emancipation for the South considered; it was assumed as the only viable path for the eradication of American slavery for decades, right up until the middle of the Civil War. It was in large part the total inflexibility of the Confederate States on the subject of slavery that guaranteed the implementation of mass, indiscriminate, rapid, and uncompensated emancipation by the Lincoln administration in the second half of the war. Indeed, one of the largest state seizures of private property in human history was fomented by Southern intransigence on sacrificing the slave labor economy over the course of any time frame.

Before the Southern slave economy became so extremely profitable and gradually entrenched as it had by 1860, there had been significant optimism that it may die out in the same manner that the slavery of the North had; careful, compensated emancipation over a long-time frame. It was how all slave emancipation had happened in America up to that point, excepting the Revolutionary War, and early on, there was no reason to believe that eventual emancipation in the Southern states would not happen the same way. A gradual emancipation scheme was put before Kentucky’s legislature in the early 1800s and was struck down despite a sizable minority in favor. Other states, generally in the upper South, openly debated the merits of compensated emancipation in their legislatures with relative openness in the early decades of American independence.

Simultaneously however, the long declining rate of profit of plantation slavery, which had been the main economic force that made the idea of emancipation feasible and desirable, was being countered by new technologies that resurrected long-term profitability in the deep South particularly. New fertilizers were being introduced that increased crop yields. The cotton gin allowed for vast quantities of cotton to be refined and processed at a profitable rate. Whereas before very little cotton had been produced in the South, a ‘cotton kingdom’ with impressive rates of profit was being created in the deep South by the 1830s that led to a massive land grab and movement of both free whites looking to capitalize on the riches and enslaved blacks being sold from the upper South states to places like Alabama and Mississippi. Over time, this led to the crystallization of a militantly pro-slavery ideology in those states that was becoming increasingly unable to conceive of a society without the riches and opulence provided by African slave labor. In addition, they were absorbing the slaves sold from places like Virginia and Maryland, leading to an increasing divergence in the economic and social institutions of the upper South and deep South. The deep South was becoming a lost cause for emancipation talk of any kind by the 1830s and 40s, but maybe the upper South would be more amenable? Slave labor was becoming a less and less integral portion of their agricultural economies, and slaves as a percentage of the general population was on the decrease in census after census as well. A slave born in Maryland would likely be toiling in a place like Mississippi or Louisiana by the decade prior to the Civil War. Maybe the upper South was northernizing.

An interesting sequence of events happened in the state of Virginia in the early 1830s regarding this notion. Members of the Ohio legislature noticed this demographic and institutional change happening piecemeal in its neighboring state and managed to pass a resolution plan for the gradual emancipation of slavery in Virginia, which was coming to be seen as a place where slavery was decaying and receding. Virginia delegates scrutinized and really considered this idea, but there was just one problem. Nat Turner’s rebellion seized Southampton County by storm as this proposal was being considered. A bloody slave insurgency led to the deaths of several dozen whites, and this prompted a real watershed shift on the subject and a sense of urgency for the Virginia legislature. Opinions polarized, and in the end the pro-Slavery forces won out in early 1832. Anti-slavery moral arguments were extinguished by the mass hysteria over revolutionary blacks killing white families in a Haitian-style deluge that had just been demonstrated in Southampton. Too many, the violent episode just proved the arguments for keeping slavery right and cemented the necessity of black subservience in the public imagination. The Turner rebellion, ironically, further cemented the control of the declining slave power in Virginia, and probably the upper South in general, despite the plantation model’s decreasing profitability and size in the economies and societies of those states. The whole upper South, despite being less dependent on slavery year by year until the war began, nevertheless maintained the institution, remained largely under the control of the political auspices of its planter class (although this was gradually challenged more and more by the poor white yeomanry as the 1860s drew nearer) and reinforced a sort of holding action on the institution of slavery and issued severe restrictions and confines through which free black people could meaningfully live in the state. The idea of gradual emancipation agreed upon in civil political terms was becoming untenable, though many in the North still tried to advance it as the only viable means of truly evading the sectional conflict and avoiding a national disaster on the subject. The South, where slavery was wildly profitable and growing exponentially, was widely seen as being a lost cause on the issue. The Deep South’s planter intelligentsia was openly conspiring about southward expansion of their system into places like Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama by the 1850s.

Lincoln himself had significant hope for the viability of gradual emancipation in the slave states, which he had publicly demonstrated for several years before ascending to the Presidency. Giving his eulogic address at the funeral of his political hero Henry Clay in 1852, he would state, “The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky… Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.” Lincoln in this statement demonstrated what he believed to be one of the greatest endemic faults of the radical abolitionists in the antebellum era: rapid emancipation would bring social upheaval and misery with it, harming the station of both blacks and whites. Morally, he often identified his perspective as close to the abolitionists in terms of the humanity and natural God-given rights of black slaves, but made it very clear that immediate emancipation would only sow chaos with it for quite some time. During his speech in Peoria, Illinois in 1854, Lincoln once again publicly endorsed gradual emancipation, though lamented Southern inaction on the point. He directly endorsed gradual emancipation in four of the seven landmark debates he held with Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858, even embarrassing Douglas for his about-face on the subject in the final debate. In the decade leading up to his Presidency, Lincoln made no debatable point as to his stance on the subject; the territories should remain free, and the federal government had no constitutional authority to directly interfere with the established slavery institutions of any given state. Its eventual abolition ought to happen however, and should be done gradually with the option of voluntary colonization remaining to allow black emigration to Liberia or elsewhere so as to lessen racial tensions in the United States and ameliorate the possibility of racial violence and division.