edfranksphd
Corporal
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2019
i think we agree but let me clarify. the South was guilty of slavery, and probably that required most of them to be racist in order to justify the righteousness of it, but they didn't mind being awash in blacks, esp in the deep South, but the North was guilty of both plain old greed (they didn't want to have to compete with slave farms and/or companies that could always undersell them) AND racism (not wanting to live near blacks, whether slave OR free). Whites in the South were dropped into a vast sea of slaves, at their own choosing, whereas Whites in the North had no Blacks to deal with, as the free ones often kept moving to Canada so that the actual % of northern population was likely well below 5%, vs 40 to 50% for the seceded South?Agreed that much of northern opposition to slavery was not because they espoused civil rights for African Americans but rather because the free soil movement argued that a slave society depressed wages and opportunities for white men. That being said, I would never claim that the south was "more progressive" when it came to race. Both north and south were guilty in their treatment of the Black population with the difference being the additional oppressive burden of slavery that existed in the states in which it was still lawful.