Comment by wqaatwt
21 days ago
> The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament
The situation was fundamentally different. Colonies that allowed slavery had no representation in parliament and the slave owners received massive “compensation” that the British people had to spend decades paying off..
Also AFAIK most slaveholders were living in Britain and just viewed their plantations as just another investment. There was very little ideological/“way of life”/racial supremacy stuff involved. So if some Liberals wanted to buyout their not necessarily very liquid “property” with cash they didn’t really have much reason to oppose it.
And then there were 5x more slaves in the US in 1864 while the population was only ~30% higher than that of Britain in 1830 (only if we don’t count the colonies).
Not sure how excited would the inhabitants of New England and other free states would have been if they were forced to buy out all the slaves in the country (if that was even an option).
Slavery for the British was a side note at that point while it was a fundamental component of the US economy.
Serfdom was fundamental to the Russian economy, but was abolished nonetheless. Alexander II forced the serfs to pay for their own freedom.
The idea that no compromise was possible sounds somewhat absurd since America did end the civil war with a compromise. "You can free the slaves, but then we oppress them for 100 or so years." Not that it was a good compromise or anything, but it does show that the civil war was fundamentally pointless.
Russia was a centralized absolutist empire. The Tsar could more or less do whatever he wanted as long as the army and some other elements of the bureaucracy supported him.
So it’s hardly applicable to the US (or Britain)
> end the civil war with a compromise
I’m not sure it’s was a compromise per se.
Most people in the north didn’t really actively support country wide abolition before the war (neither did Lincoln) nor were they necessarily particularly concerned about the treatment of the African-American population.
Opposing slavery is a very low bar. Most people in the free states were still deeply racist and segregation was effectively (while not necessarily legally) still a thing there. It only became a major issue in the mid 1900s.