..with about 2,000 slaves and 17,000 free blacks. Delaware would likely have become the next US state to abolish slavery.. gradual emancipation is something that Americans of all colors should look at as an interesting "what if" example..
I like considering the what-ifs of history.. But Delaware was actually offered Federally financed (thru Federal bonds), compensated emancipation, and they rejected it. Even as a Border State that stayed in the Union, they believed abolition was an internal State's Rights issue (a precedent established by individual Northern state-level abolition). Their southern county of Sussex was still invested in slavery, and feared the cultural & economic consequences of sudden abolition. Lincoln even gave a flexible, stretched-out time table to alleviate the stress of sudden emancipation.
19th-century Americans still had a healthy fear of Federal overreach tho.. It kills me how a lot of the modern Civil War debate implies that slavery & States' Rights were mutually exclusive. Slavery was viewed within the context of broader States' Rights. States (often on both sides of the Mason-Dixon), propehtically understood it was a slippery slope if they allowed the Fed. government to take sovereignty over their business.
To me, it's a shame we have cultural-Marxist creeps groveling for historical events they had no personal role in.. instead of using their public platform to address the complexity of their states' histories. Give fair hearing & study to all the ideas of their ancestors. It's moronic how simplistic the hand-wringing, cultural-Marxist presentation of the Civil War has become..
A resource I thought was a well-researched, objective study of Civil War Delaware:
Delaware During the Civil War. (H. Hancock).
(Sorry for the long post, but love Civil War history.)