Obviously it was a good thing that it was banned, but I’m just wondering if it would technically be considered authoritarian.
As in, is any law that restricts people’s freedom to do something (yes, even if it’s done to also free other people from oppression as in that case, since it technically restricts the slave owner’s freedom to own slaves), considered authoritarian, even if at the time that the law is passed, it’s only a small section of people that are still wanting to do those things and forcibly having their legal ability to do them revoked?
Or would it only be considered authoritarian if a large part of society had their ability to do a particular thing taken away from them forcibly?
You’ve now described a second scenario in which authority is being removed and not added.
But authority can be used/imposed to take away some else’s authority, can’t it? Or can authority only be used to do something to someone, not to prevent someone from doing something?
What these questions are missing is that the government didn’t start from a place of neutrality, they started by enforcing the institution of slavery. They didn’t go from having no authority over slavery to having all of it, rather the authority they had remained static. The only variable for the amount of authority then is that the classes of “slave” and “slave owner” stopped being a thing, so there were no longer slave owners that had absolute authority over slaves.