British paid out slave owners and abolished slavery decades before the USA did and without killing 1.5 million people. Sometimes it is better to pay out an injustice.
Incidentally, Brazil abolished slavery without a war and without paying out anyone.
The British working class was forced to pay the former slavers until a few years ago, while the former slaves got nothing. That was in no way just or good or useful.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.
Of course many workers did care about slavery and wanted to end it, so they allied themselves to the northern ruling class.
I think the people who stopped being slaves, along with their descendants, would disagree.
Buying out unjust holders changes the form of injustice being carried, makes the illegitemacy less viscerally real & more palatable. But, imo, it's embarassing that law offers itself no options to fundamentally correct it's problematic past. It feels like a misalignment, to protect property & capital above all else, even in the most absurdly unfair & illegitemate of situations.
Perhaps in places such events are politically necessary for change. But I dont think I am alone in finding that these past events & this present one reek, that it is low actions to escape the crime but still enable & make profit of the stunning injustice. To govern without ever permitting any actual rebalancing feels inadequate to build a worthy way.