That’s what I’m saying. The poor Southerners did not want to compete for jobs with about 4 extra million available workers. However, that would have been a good situation for northern industrialists who would have wanted a never ending supply of workers for their industries they owned in the South.
That’s what I’m saying. The poor Southerners did not want to compete for jobs with about 4 extra million available workers. However, that would have been a good situation for northern industrialists who would have wanted a never ending supply of workers for their industries they owned in the South.
*****You have it backwards the South was getting wealthy by the day. GREED. the yankees did not like that and wanted the cotton and textile mills and they got them do a search for textile mills in New Jersey....
By contrast, the Northern textile plant owners didn’t particularly want to see an end to slavery since that would disrupt cotton supplies. While there was undeniably a good bit of support for abolition in the North, it was certainly not a consensus position prior to the war. There were also many in the North who were perfectly fine with the status quo. Unskilled laborers, and immigrants in particular, probably would have been opposed to ending it — more potential competition for jobs. (Or just as likely they were too busy working 14 hour days to really care that much). Opinion in the North was most definitely split on the matter. Even amongst abolitionists, there were many who by today’s standards would be looked upon as blatant racists. Even Lincoln, for instance, initially wanted freed slaves to return to Africa and thought that blacks could never be socially equal to whites.
When the Southern states seceded, this still was the case. The Northern states went to war to preserve the union, not to end slavery. Lincoln personally opposed slavery but also believed he had no authority to end it. Famously, he said that (paraphrasing) he would do whatever he needed to do regarding slavery if it helped restore the Union.
The Emancipation Proclamation was the first step toward the transformation of the war into a fight to end slavery. Ironically, as a practical matter, it freed exactly zero slaves. It excluded slaves in the border states and those in areas of the Confederacy under Federal control at the time. It did however change the focus of the war. Probably though had Lincoln lived, there may not have been an end to slavery even upon the South’s defeat. Lincoln favored relatively mild terms for readmission of the Southern states. Formation of new state governments and 10% of the population taking a loyalty oath to the US were his intended requirements.
We’ll never know, of course, how it would have played out in that scenario. Lincoln was assassinated and the popular opinion changed sharply. The assassination was seen not as an isolated act of a small conspiracy, but as a last gasp attempt by the Confederacy to preserve its lost cause. The popular opinion in the North changed to the notion that the seceding states needed to be punished harshly. Not only was slavery ended as a result, but Sourhern states were militarily occupied and the Reconstruction program begun to further punish the South by promoting legal equality for freed blacks.
The sad irony of the whole thing is that the South seceded from the union to preserve slavery, but that very act of secession undoubtedly hastened the end of slavery. Without secession and the ensuing war, who knows how long it might have lasted.