the North didn't know what living around niggers actually meant in real terms - in terms of culture and economics.
Half the North, up to and including Lincoln, that weren't women expected the slaves to be repatriated. Them staying was in many ways a bait and switch by true multicultural idealists. Or maybe just a fact of reality. Migrations of that scale have rarely been imposed by the law. It would have had to be a thing where the slaves up and decided that was a good thing for them. Then you could have seen them colonize Africa. In fact at that point they were culturally and genetically mulatto. As foreign in Africa as the first Africans that made shore in the New World.
Half the North, up to and including Lincoln, that weren't women expected the slaves to be repatriated. Them staying was in many ways a bait and switch by true multicultural idealists. Or maybe just a fact of reality. Migrations of that scale have rarely been imposed by the law. It would have had to be a thing where the slaves up and decided that was a good thing for them. Then you could have seen them colonize Africa. In fact at that point they were culturally and genetically mulatto. As foreign in Africa as the first Africans that made shore in the New World.