Submission is Ruin

Excellent thread. Thea's statement that Northern hypocrisy was blatant is very true. Still is. As to child labor, 14 hour days were the short days. Many children as young as 5 worked 16 hour days. Most commonly being locked in the mills and factories. Shoes taken away and even broken glass surrounding the premises. All so they could not leave. Many were bonded labor. Having to actually work years to pay off the bond paid to have them brought in from famished Ireland. In fact, this continued until a factory fire killed hundreds of women and children because they were locked in and could not flee. And even then northern resistance to even the most basic of workers rights was incredible. Look at Northern industrialists’s reaction to striking workers. Full fledged wars developed. Women and children burned alive etc. The belief that they were free and could leave is also a bit of a stretch. Dying from injury or diseases caused by the labor by age 8 is not exactly free. Not the nasty practice of withholding the last month pay from employees. Requiring them to sue to recover it. It was incredibly horrible and not even addressed for eons after slavery was ‘officially’ abolished. Much the same way women did not get the right to vote. Many native Americans did not receive the right to vote until after the 1950's. Insuring they had no vote also insured there’s be no voice.
As to all the belonging on the Slavery as the Cause thread, I don't see it.

[sgtcsa]

Thanks AP,
I knew that there were many an instance in the North that went tit for tat in the wrongdoings of certain peoples. It is good to see someone bring it out. I'm sure that Northerners do not relish the idea of seeing their own side commit such crimes against some of the very people that they try so hard to tell the rest of us just how badly the South treated them. As for the freedom aspect of it, well, put the way you so masterfully put it........What exactly is freedom? Were they really free? Free from what? Free to move from job to job? If they did, would they be treated any differently? Were children really any different than the Negro's, when it came to how they were treated? Could one really call that freedom? I suppose one could still rationalize the differences. But the bottom line is........is one that much different than the other? Freedom?.....from what? That you weren't 'owned'? As if those children had any real say in the matter. Just thoughts.

Respectfully,
sgtcsa

[bill_torrens]

One might wonder how Northern gazes could be focussed on what was going on in the cotton fields of Mississippi when such inequality and exploitation was happening right under their own noses. The answer lies in a fortuitous marriage of ideology with profit:

In the North, one Republican declared in1854, “every man holds his fortune in his own right arm; and his position in society, in life, is to be tested by his own individual character.” This belief explains the fact that for all their glorification of labor, Republicans looked down upon those who labored for wages all their lives. “It is not the fault of the system,” if a man did not rise above the position of wage earner, Lincoln explained, “but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.” Poverty, or even the failure to advance economically, were thus individual, not social failures, the consequence of poor personal habits – laziness, extravagance, and the like. Greeley believed that “chance or ‘luck’” had “little to do with mens’ prosperous or adverse fortunes,” and he complained that too many men blamed banks, tariffs, and hard times for their personal failures, while in reality the fault was “their own extravagance and needless ostentation.” The Springfield Republican summed up this outlook when it declared in 1858 that there could be “no oppression of the laborer here which it is not in his power to remedy, or which does not come from his own inefficiency and lack of entreprise.”

The free labor attitude towards the poor was made doubly clear in the aftermath of the Panic of 1857, when northern cities were struck by widespread unemployment and labor unrest. Demonstrations of the poor – “never before witnessed in the towns of the abundant West” – occurred all too frequently. As they were to do many times subsequently, Republicans blamed the Panic not on impersonal economic forces, but on the individual shortcomings of Americans, particularly their speculation in lands and stocks which had reached “mania” proportions in the years preceding the crash, and on generally extravagant living…Republican papers throughout the North urged the unemployed to tighten their belts and retrench their expenditures. The Chicago Press and Tribune went so far as to say that drunkenness and laziness accounted for nine-tenths of the pauperism in the West, and that the only remedy was “a little wholesome hunger and a salutary fit of chattering by reason of excessive cold.”…and when the poor took to the streets demanding bread and work, Republicans reacted with shock and indignation. The National Era, one of the most radical Republican journals on the slavery question, declared that the noisiest demonstrators were those who were poor because of their own faults. “We do not believe,” said the Era, “that the noisy meetings in our Eastern cities, pretending to be composed of working men, represent the real feelings of the working classes….their style of proceedings and spirit have a flavor of communism about them; they suggest a foreign origin.” The reaction of Republicans to the poverty of the late 1850s revealed the basic deficiency of their middle-class free labor outlook. Even as they demanded equal opportunity for social advancement for all laborers, they also subscribed to an ideology which told them that an almost perfect opportunity for social mobility existed. They could therefore say with Senator Harlan of Iowa that their object was to place the laborer “on a platform of equality – let him labor in the same sphere, with the same chances for success and promotion – let the contest be exactly equal between him and others – and if, in the conflict of mind with mind, he should sink beneath the billow, let him perish.”

[Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, pp.23-25.]

Far be it from me to suggest insincerity on anyone’s part, but it is truly remarkable how the moral attitudes of Northern capitalists and politicians have developed in ways that have never proved incompatible with their own pecuniary interests. They managed to sell their own slaves before being hit by the shattering realisation that slavery was wicked. Thereafter different social and economic systems developed in the North and South. What both seemed to have in common was that a small group of people grew wealthy out of exploiting the labour of many. But in the North it turned out that exploitation was actually the fault of the exploited. Whereas the exploiters in the South were “no better than common murderers.”

And so there was nothing to disturb the conscience, easy sleep and ever-increasing profits of the Northern capitalist. But the inequalities in the Southern system demanded violent intervention and the remaking of the entire region. Well, I’m sure it was all very sincerely meant. And if, as a consequence of the remaking of the South, more political power and even more money passed into the hands of the people who bankrolled the Republican Party then….well, one just has to accept that coincidences do happen.