And so, the idea of slave property contradicts the idea of private property, and the Southerners taking their stand on their property rights and thei… - Harry V. Jaffa

Yeah, I’d like to comment. In the first place, the idea that the federal government in 1860 should have offered to buy the slaves is a political absurdity. Any claim by Lincoln or his party of any jurisdiction over slavery in the states would have been regarded, and justly regarded, as completely unconstitutional, and advocating the overthrow of the Constitution.

This, by the way, was a demand for the greatest increase of federal power prior to the New Deal, maybe even since the New Deal. The greatest demand for an increase in federal power was made by the Southern states in 1860. And the majority in the convention refused to adopt this, and they refused to adopt it because nobody could be elected dogcatcher in a free state who supported a federal police power over slavery in the territories.

Bob Dole and Jack Kemp declared that the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln. But just what is the connection between the Republican Party of 1860 and that of 1996? The essence of slavery, Lincoln said, was expressed in the proposition: "You work; I'll eat." Upon his election as president, he was besieged by office seekers who drove him to distraction. Lincoln was blunt in his judgment of the great majority of them. They wanted to eat without working. Lincoln saw the demand for the protection of slavery and the demand for government sinecures to be at bottom one and the same. The origin of all constitutional rights, according to Lincoln, was the right that a man had to own himself, and therefore to own the product of his own labor. Government exists to protect that right, and to regulate property only to make it more valuable to its possessors.