[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Sampiro, I’ll freely acknowledge that the United States as a whole has many ugly parts in its history - and as you pointed out our history of wiping out the Indians is one of the ugliest. But we acknowledge that what we did was wrong and don’t celebrate it.
[/QUOTE]
What about Columbus Day? How’s a federal holiday honoring a man who enslaved Indians and set in motion the rape of their wealth and cultures not analogous to a state holiday honoring a watershed moment in Southern history?
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I’ll admit northerners didn’t always see blacks as equals either. And we kept some slaves as well.
[/QUOTE]
That’s mighty white o’ ya, there, and I thank ya.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
But we at least grew up on our own.
[/QUOTE]
Oh Jeezus… I don’t really mean any offense by this when I ask, were you born this stupid or did you take private lessons from Terry Schiavo? Which of these scenarios do you really truly honestly sincerely believe is the scenario:
1- One day in the late 18th/early 19th century, dawn broke across the nation, and those who lived above the Mason Dixon line all suddenly said “You know, slavery is just… wrong. It’s wretched and evil and I don’t know what we were thinking. The black people are our brothers and sisters, and from now on they are free and we’ll give them reparations and let’s all live together in love and harmony!” And they did, and there were no hard feelings anywhere, and that night all the black people, no longer slaves, and all the white people, who now saw the errors of their ways, all sat together for a meal of Yankee Pot Roast, Cream of Wheat, and assorted flavors of pop.
Meanwhile their mean nasty counterparts in the south woke up, and those who had the same thoughts hardly got the “wrong. It’s wretched and…” out of their mouths before they were, as one, choked to death on 3-day old cornbread by the evil ones who constituted 90% of the southerners, and so great was their indignation that they said “Ye shall no more give the slaves straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves!”, whence did the black people in the field cry out as one, “Oh motherfucker! He wants us to make bricks now too! This here’s some bullshit!”, and one among them named Nat Turner addressed his grievances through the chain of command and was slaughtered, but his son Ike would remember the injustice and take it out on his wife.
or
- Slavery withered in the north because it was never as integrated into the economy because the northern economy was due to many reasons focused almost from the settling of the continent by Europeans upon manufacture (Scots-Irish:Pennsylvania linen trade/distilleries/furniture/mills/etc.) as the climate and soil were on the whole not as predisposed to cash crop plantation economy but to family farms. In the south however, where the climate was warmer and manufactories were not as feasible due to heat and a shortage of labor, the plantation economy worked better as it brought in huge revenues initially from the already extant European tobacco market (previously dominated by the Spanish) and blackseed cotton on the coasts. When there was no way to grow blackseed cotton more than 100 miles from the coast and green seed cotton was too interwoven with seeds to be profitable, slavery essentially stopped expanding. The slave populations south of the tobacco belt and west of the rice/indigo/blackseed cotton belts were essentially non-existent until the early 19th century, when the cotton gin made green seed cotton easy to separate and, the fields of the western territories being well disposed to its growing, made slavery explode as for the first time plantation economy was feasible and lucrative west of the Appalachians.
In the north, the never ending influx of immigrants from Scotland/Ireland/Britain/Germany (the vast majority of whom came to Philadelphia because 1- it was the leading trade partner of their region and thus where most of the ships were heading [and passengers were only an ancillary means of income for the ships- the big money was export of manufactured goods and import of raw materials] 2- Pennsylvania was a major haven for German immigrants 3- Boston was [well etc etc etc]
all provided a source of free labor that was a lot cheaper than purchasing slaves. Thus, most slaves held in the north were mainly used as domestics and as general farm and warehouse/dock workers, and in fact in NYC and NJ and CT the practice thrived for long after it did in most other places where families were generally doing well enough without slaves to support their own needs and did not have huge cash crops as an economic focal point.
Thus, a hypothetical Scots Irish immigrant named Dick C. McEveryman who settled in the south (either because the ship he booked passage on was headed to Savannah with a load of velvet or because he got to Pennsylvania and heard of free land down south on the Great Wagon Road) would, once settled in the south, seek to support himself by tapping into the already existing markets for agricultural raw materials and thus sought slaves to provide more labor to produce more raw material as it was the best available source of labor. Meanwhile, Dick C.'s identical twin brother, also Scot’s Irish but with the oddly Chinese name of Yan Kee McEveryman, boards a linen ship bound to Ulster’s main trading port partner of Philadelphia, eventually winds up in Scranton, and goes to work in the mills for a while and eventually buys a small apple farm for extra revenue but his main source of income is making chairs which he does well enough at that he one day has a factory, where rather than spend $100,000 to buy 100 slaves to work he hires penniless immigrants for less than a quarter of that amount per year and gets rich, and buys his wife a cook and a maid.
Consequently, not through any innate racism (though racism was pretty innate) the southern McEveryman’s becomes rich through slave labor because that’s the market where he lives while his northern twin becomes rich through free labor, because that’s the market where he lives. And that’s why by the early 1800s it wasn’t that big of a deal to northern McEveryman to free his maid and cook as they’re not really an economic necessity, while to southern McEverymans to free their slaves would have been economically ruinous.
Which scenario is the more logical for why the north ended slavery sooner?