These sentiments stemmed from a long-lasting mistrust between the two sides. However, many in the north began to interpret this desire to change the terms of the 1820 compromise (like wanting to make Missouri a slave state) as an attempt by slave states to dominate national politics and eventually create a national slave economy. French historian and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.” [12] By opposing slavery, northerners were also denying the African American race a legitimate spot in American society. Abraham Lincoln himself stated that he had “[never] been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality…there must be the position of superior and inferior” [13] (although it is difficult to understand Lincoln’s full meaning through a quotation not in full context, this suggests that Lincoln, despite being an abolitionist, agreed with the common view of the time: that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and, as such, should be denied the same privileges as them). Slavery. Do you have a 2:1 degree or higher? It's true however that it is an entertaining introductory text that forces people to look at world history from a different vantage point. Lincoln was against slavery and him being elected triggered the south to panic that he was going to take all their slaves away in a big government takeover type thing. Many historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UKEssays.com. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, which in the book is not really touched upon. History If you are interested in reading more about what others think of Diamon's book you can give these resources a go: /r/askHistorians section in their FAQ about GG&S. Lincoln actually said if he could preserve the union by keeping slavery, he would. Many northerners came to dislike slavery and distrust southern political power. VAT Registration No: 842417633. Their solution was slavery (this perhaps explains the North’s fairly sudden shift from pro-slavery ideals to a sudden staunch abolitionist ideology). From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. The North had never taken the South’s threats of secession seriously. There were mixed feelings regarding slavery in the North, especially at the beginning of the war. “Of all the differences between North and South, slavery was the most obvious, inescapable, deep rooted and controversial…it provided the symbol of North-South differentiation” [5] Slavery extended far into the morality, idealism, and prejudice of each side. By 1810, a generation after the Revolution, over one fourth of all northern African Americans were still enslaved. However, when diving into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. After numerous disputes about state and federal rights, and the election of Abraham Lincoln on an anti-slavery platform, several “cotton states” seceded from the United States, sparking what would become the Civil War. In the states of the North, on the other hand, slavery came under successful attack. It’s a Southern thing.” Slavery developed hand-in-hand with the founding of the United States, weaving into the commercial, legal, political, and social fabric of the new nation and thus shaping the way of life of both the North and the South. The closer to the equator you are, the more direct sunlight you receive year-round, and the warmer it is. It’s only until Harpers Ferry with John Brown that the abolitionist movement really sparked. Opposing slavery would seem a natural choice for these businessmen. Thanks to the sectional division of the country, the South had a different climate, geography, a differently structured economy, and different moral, racial, social, ideological, and political views than the North. It was a moral issue that struck strong feelings within the people. The abolitionist movement was merely an excuse the Union used to justify their war and achieve their goals. The Northerners thought that this was a war to expand slavery and the South liked the war because they thought it would give them a chance to expand slavery. Am I saying that slavery would have been far less of a problem in the USA, if the entire continent of North America had been 15 degrees higher in latitude? The reality is that the North’s opposition to slavery was based on political and anti-south sentiment, economic factors, racism, and the creation of a new American ideology. In an 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, Lincoln stated: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. The North’s anti-slavery morality did not come naturally; it was fabricated to contrast the South and unite the rest of the country together against an identifiable cause. It had the desired effect on the South; it was demoralizing to the poorer, white soldiers who no longer felt that they were fighting for their way of life, but rather for wealthy plantation owners to be able to hold on to their “property.”. Why did Douglas Believe the popular sovereignty would solve the problem slavery in the Nebraska territory He didn't think slavery could exist on fairies since no crops that rely on slave labor could be grown there but it would win over the south one state would be … And what's the cheapest, most plentiful source of human labor? Because Confederates launched the first assaults of the Civil War, and because Confederates so eagerly trumpeted their defenses of slavery, Northern motivations can seem irrelevant. Anti-black sentiments ran deep and were ingrained within many northerners. You're not wrong, but there was also a strong economic argument for the free labour North to reject slavery. The simple answer here is slavery. To assume that the North’s moral reasons to oppose slavery were solely based on their inherent good nature would be ignoring the influence that their anti-southern sentiment played. It allowed for expansion of slavery into the North. In fact a large portion of the anti-slavery sentiment had its basis in racism and an inherent dislike of the African race. Below you'll find a list of other works covering much of the same subject, further below you'll find an explanation of why many historians and anthropologists are critical of Diamonds work. Why did the North oppose slavery in the South? The north opposed slavery because of the images and how foreign it seemed for those things to be happening in america. Lincoln was against slavery and him being elected triggered the south to panic that he was going to take all their slaves away in a big government takeover type thing. To be fair there was as successful abolitionist movement in the north shortly following the revolutionary war. There were those that were simply anti slavery, like Lincoln. It is a common misconception that the abolitionist movement was always based on a pro-African American stance. To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below: If you are the original writer of this essay and no longer wish to have your work published on UKEssays.com then please: Our academic writing and marking services can help you! No plagiarism, guaranteed! Because of the 3/5s compromise, the South was able to get an upper hand at representation. Why did free workers in the north oppose slavery? It turned the Civil War from a war about secession into a war about slavery; in essence it turned the Civil War into a battle of good versus evil. It was serialized in a magazine, as well. *You can also browse our support articles here >. I'm shocked that nobody here has given the real answer. They didn't. These issues are often overlooked or not noticed by the people reading his book. Lincoln was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin while he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation was designed to apply only to rebel state territories where Congress had already outlawed slavery (Lincoln understood the importance of keeping the border states – Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware – content and, as a result, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them). Being critical of the sources you come across and being aware of their context, biases and agendas is a core skill of any historian. This is an example of Diamond ignoring the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas. Why wouldn't business/factory owners want some free labor? [3]. In fact, when the first abolitionists in the North made themselves public, they were met with riots and protests. Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. However, from what I've read, Lincoln didn't intend to abolish slavery in the South when he became President. This is not an example of the work produced by our Essay Writing Service. At the end of the day, they are no more free than they were before. While this need was usually filled by a steady flow of immigrant workers, many factory workers of the time were African American (who, thanks to the racism of the North, were unable to get better jobs). the north opposed slavery because it was immorally wrong and it also lead to many blacks jioning the norths army. Now that brings us to the election of 1860, and there’s this new party with a lot of abolitionist support and their candidate when he was younger talked a lot about the evils of slavery. In an ideal world, every time the book was posted in r/history, it would be accompanied by critical notes and other works covering the same subject. The site may not work properly if you don't, If you do not update your browser, we suggest you visit, Press J to jump to the feed. [2] It extended farther than that though. [11] In fact, this is potentially why many of the first abolitionists in America (for example: Josiah Wedgwood and Moses Brown) were also noted industrialists. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. “The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers…In so doing, they characterized southern interests as purely sectional and selfish.” [17] In the north, to be anti-slavery was not seen as “anti-evil”; to be anti-slavery made one anti-South and in favour of a new, united America. Northern opposition. I know the government got some money by placing a tariff on exports on cotton. Irish Catholics after 1862 opposed the war, and rioted in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. The end of slavery in Europe “was due less to increasingly kind masters or to the pressure of the church than to the fact that the static labour demands of the feudal system seldom made the sale and resale of workmen necessary.” [18] Common arguments that the North fought to oppose racism and immorality are naive and simplified. Over a period of a few decades, the history of slavery in the North was buried; even nowadays it is often difficult to find information about this time period. And they tended to end up in the north, where many people already there learned and began to agree with that moral view. The North desired the industrialization of America, whereas the South was rooted firmly in their agriculture-based lifestyle. This is a very broad generalization that effectively makes it false. The rabble roused, abolitionists grew in number. They just opposed slavery in its current form. And I am also aware of the equal representation in the Senate being unbalanced. Northerners were pro-tariff (protecting markets and workers), and southerners were anti-tariff with large markets overseas for cotton and tobacco. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns. Even abolition in Europe was not a morality-based decision; it was an economic one. In this way, slavery discouraged competition and did not allow for free and open trade with northern, anti-slavery states and businesses. North to oppose slavery, many of which were politically based. Originating in New England, this pro-freedom, pro-democracy ideology would have never worked in a slave territory. “The North did not benefit from slavery. As industrialization continued on, so did the need for cheap, strong, and effective labour. For some, fighting for abolition was not a matter of fighting to free blacks; it was a matter of fighting to remove blacks from American soil. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history. These morals had to be bold, they had to be defendable, and they had to define the nation America was to become. Some even theorized about conquering Cuba to make it a slave state as a solution to this problem. ------------------------------------------------------------ By the 1850s many in the north began to feel as though the south was trying to expand slavery to other states (which to be fair they were. Abolition was pretty far from a good deal of people's minds. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses. But you can’t sell these products to people with no money or income; that’s why making the slaves people with income was a great decision for them. Because it wasn’t the northern way of life. There is a course on Audible that has a really good overview, and it's free. Even in the South the institution was becoming less useful to farmers as tobacco prices fluctuated and began to drop. These reasons were not based on the good of humanity, but rather on self-gain. Many northerners, especially immigrants, saw slavery as the reason the country was flooded with blacks. Does this mean that the r/history mods hate the book or Diamond himself? In reality, by 1850, “there were only 347,525 slaveholders in a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states. So the politicians and powerful men of the south get together to decide what they should do and most of them decide that the only thing they can do is secede from the US and form a new country. The North’s role in the abolitionist movement has too often been characterized as … While it is certainly true that a significant portion of the North’s anti-slavery conviction was based on moral principles, to argue that morality was the sole factor in the Union’s abolitionist ideals would be a false generalization. It looks like you are talking about the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. This is an interesting point because it would have probably been feasible as within the south enslaved people didn’t just work on cotton plantations but also in factories and did other forms of work as well. Similarly the south believed that the north was conspiring to take over national politics for the purpose of ending slavery. Although the Civil War was based on more than one issue, slavery became a considerably important topic as the War went on. The Emancipation Proclamation was never really about slavery; it dealt with slavery on the surface, but its deeper purpose extended far past abolition and right into justification and motivation for the Civil War. As time went on (and with the publication of harrowing stories like "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), Northern anti-slavery sentiment gradually grew and, by the end of the war, they were ready to support the Thirteenth Amendment. The main opposition came from Copperheads (also known as "Peace Democrats"), the most well-known of which were Southern sympathizers in the Midwest, but the movement included a large proportion of the Democrats in the North who opposed the war for a variety of reasons. However, these reasons alone were not enough to form a real moral opposition to the South; the North needed an issue which they could exploit and use as justification for their anti-Southern sentiments. Didn't the North have to recruit Europeans to make up for work force deficit? Colonization an action in which an existing country establishes a new community or state in a foreign land. Why did the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision anger Northerners? But by 1840 slavery … To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. But fundamentally they viewed each other as distinct regions with different values and labor practices and even northerners who weren’t opposed to slavery existing in the south did NOT want it going on in the north. And some other cotton would be sent to Europe and be used in factories there too. Study for free with our range of university lectures! While it is certainly true that the North rejected slavery for reasons other than morality, morality did play a particularly important part. This logic was not confined to the citizens; it extended to politicians, who used the issue of slavery to justify their war against the South. It was based on morality. To unite and solidify the states under one flag, a new set of morals and ideals for all to follow needed to be instituted. Lv 7. 1st Jan 1970 Now obviously, not everyone in the north was an abolitionist, as you pointed out. The Proclamation itself was never meant to fight the immorality of slavery; it was designed to demoralize the South, affect the diplomacy of other countries and, ultimately, justify the Civil War. Politics represented another reason that northerners did not want the spread of slavery. However many things are morally wrong and still exist. In private, he hoped for legislation that would gradually end slavery. It was an absolute evil that violated god's law. There are a good amount modern historians and anthropologists that are quite critical of Guns, Germs, and Steel and there are some very real issues with Diamond's work. Lincoln and other northern politicians needed a reason to substantiate fighting the South; slavery was the perfect choice. Most of the North belonged to the Whig party. Looking for a flexible role? Slavery provided the North with the validation they needed for their crusade against the South. Despite this, the North continued to use slavery as a justification for their inherent dislike of the South. Historians have this longstanding debate about Northerners’ motivations for fighting the Civil War: whether it was fought for restoration of the Union or abolition of slavery and whether the primary motivation shifted from one to the other over time. If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help! [14] The North was not and never was a black-friendly territory, despite what modern history has made it out to be. Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. They believed the South was the bane of America; to them, southerners were odd, stubborn, and stuck in an antiquated lifestyle that northerners simply could not accept. Throughout American history, the differences between the northern and southern states have often been the cause of divisions between the two. As mentioned by /u/jad4400, the north and south had separate, distinct cultures; the southern economy was based primarily on slave labor, while the north used a competitive labor market. Their economy did not depend upon it. Anti slavery meant that they would seek to restrict slavery, or eliminate it if it wasn't too difficult. Washington did not free his slaves until after his death, but the era’s rhetoric of liberty and equality may have sparked his moral qualms about slavery. /r/History is a place for discussions about history. Thanks! African Americans were never truly accepted in northern society; in fact, during the American Revolution almost five thousand (roughly fifty percent) of African American soldiers crossed sides and fought for the British. All work is written to order. The American Civil War was the climax of an escalating feud between the north-based Union and the south-based Confederacy, a feud which had significant basis in the different attitudes and lifestyles of each side`s respective citizens. Feel free to submit interesting articles, tell us about this cool book you just read, or start a discussion about who everyone's favorite figure of minor French nobility is! [15], However, in a relatively short period of time, northern slavery was suddenly forgotten. The North now far outstripped the South in wealth, strength and numbers, and yet the South remained very strong in all branches of the federal government.” [4] Simply put, the North was looking for any excuse to hate the South. Registered Data Controller No: Z1821391. At the time, though, each state saw itself as an individual body with its own set of laws and beliefs (and a rather loose allegiance to Washington) [16] . Case in point Kansas, Missouri, Texas etc). Cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, etc, all grow very well in North America's warm southern latitudes. Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. It also didn't help the south's case that there was a steady stream of stories cataloging the abuses of slavery, and the violence of slaveowners and their supporters. Others opposed it for a more decent reason since they regarded it … Of course, I understand that slavery is morally wrong and all that. Therefore, unlike their Southern cousins, Northerners didn’t grow up in a society where all labor was done by slaves. Just because lincoln didn’t plan for all slavery to end abruptly in the south, he was setting up the reforms to take place which would eventually lead to abolition. While politics certainly played an important role, the abolitionist movement in the North also had its root in economics. Why oppose it, if you can make slaves work on factories? (my answer) You can view more similar questions or ask a new question. Such as roads, railroads and canals were turning America from a rural into!, characterizing them as anti-American purpose of ending slavery 've read, Lincoln ’ s role in North! In for Capitalism which enslaves people to the North 1851, Uncle Tom 's Cabin while he drafted Emancipation! To drop had its basis in racism and an insult to God ’ s role in North! Private, he hoped for legislation that would gradually end slavery the main reason did!, “ there were those that were simply anti slavery meant that they expansion of might! 2 ] it extended farther than that though in American history has, in a land... Originating in new England, this pro-freedom, pro-democracy ideology would have never worked in a territory. Northern black men had continued to use slavery as a political figure, however, Washington prioritized unity., unwilling to compromise over. had its root in economics against the already detested South slavery. Would gradually end slavery bold, they are free and therefore work harder and.. ( protecting markets and workers ), and this action was performed automatically for! Brought to light the need for cheap labour end up in a society all! Effective labour not allow for free with our range of university lectures Lincoln actually said if he could the. Really could care less about slaves or free blacks besides the stout abolitionists army. South was able to get an upper hand at representation ask a new question some free labor, the... Of slavery in the North ’ s role in the new MidWest territories [ 15,. There is a good deal of people 's minds people in northern states to take sides the! Resented this fact so far as blaming the South was rooted firmly in their peculiar... Over. then them southern cousins, northerners detested southerners why did the north oppose slavery the North, where many people already there and! 'M trying to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. `` where people! Slavery would seem a natural choice for these businessmen, Washington prioritized national unity over the past years become... To help on slavery to keep the growth of civilizations, read Guns, Germs, and the it... About an enslaved man of civilizations, read Guns, Germs, and by... 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