Compensated emancipation in the United States
During the Civil War, in November 1861, President Lincoln drafted an act to be introduced before the legislature of Delaware, one of the four slave states that did not secede from the Union (the others being Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri), for compensated emancipation.[8] The American historian R. R. Palmer opined that the abolition of slavery in the United States without compensation to the former slave owners was an "annihilation of individual property rights without parallel ...in the history of the Western world".[9] Economic historian Robert E. Wright argues that compensated emancipation would have been much cheaper, with fewer deaths, if the federal government had purchased and freed all the slaves, rather than fighting the Civil War.[10] Another economic historian, Roger Ransom, writes that Gerald Gunderson compared compensated emancipation to the cost of the war and "notes that the two are roughly the same order of magnitude – 2.5 to 3.7 billion dollars".[11][12] Ransom also writes that compensated emancipation would have tripled federal outlays if paid over the period of 25 years and was a program that had no political support within the United States during the 1860s.