I certainly would. A little more empathy for slaveowners (that is, the ability to see things from their point of view) would have enabled the US to abolish slavery without the bloody civil war.
Every country in the western henisphere abolished slavery around about the same time, but only in the US did it cause a civil war.
This is a misunderstanding of American history. I don't fully know why it was so easy to do away with slavery in other parts of the world (and it mostly happened all within about 100 years of each other), but in the US, slavery was core to the economic system of the south - a slavocracy headed by white slavocrats.
The slavocrats would have been happy to have empathy, for the northerners to treat them softly and allow their system to persist. They were (not entirely happily) trading free state / slave state as new states were admitted to the union.
It was only when a fever pitch of abolition put the new Republican party in with Lincoln as president did the south finally decide it would be impossible to continue their system in co-existance with the industrialized free north. The capitalist free north also had an interest in liberating the slaves so they could be put to use as highly productive industrial workers instead of agricultural workers.
To this end, the south seceded from the union and fired the first blow against the north at Ft. Sumter. A brutal military campaign was necessary to break the power of the slavocracy and free the slaves.
You can look at the historical material interests of the north and conclude it wasn't entirely selfless, but by god it was necessary to end the evil endemic to the southern economic system.
Every country in the western henisphere abolished slavery around about the same time, but only in the US did it cause a civil war.