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?
Representative Democracies are, by definition, authoritarian. A small number of people are elected, democratically, to make the decisions for the majority.
With the contradiction being that the people who were pro slavery could just decide, "Nah, we're not going to end slavery", and continue to do slavery. Which I'm pretty sure is generally how that went in the USA.
If democracy is authoritarian, then what is the lack of democracy called?
Depends on how things are organized i guess.
Two things that come to mind are dictatorships and aristocracies, at least as far a governments go.
In short, authoritarian...?
Oh... you were asking a rhetorical question.
Yeah, sure. That works.