What self-interested incentives did white Northerners have to oppose slavery?

Factual Questions
41

They were much more than that

When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, joining Buffalo to Albany on the Hudson River, the transportation cost was cut to $15 per ton and the journey took eight days instead of 28. This made it viable to ship U.S. wheat as far away as England…

The grain elevator was invented in Buffalo in 1843, and these began to pop up along rivers and at ports and it was instrumental in the rise of grain exports in the mid-century.

These advances made it feasible for the United States to fill foreign demand when domestic production was bountiful. Most U.S. grain exports in the mid-1800s were to Cuba, the Caribbean, and South America. Europe was the largest potential market at that time but was only interested in U.S. grain when crops at home failed.

Industrialization and urbanization in England boosted its imports of U.S. grain by 1860. That year, total U.S. wheat and flour exports reached 16 million bushels while corn and cornmeal shipments surpassed 4 million. In 1861, those numbers jumped to 42 million and 12 million bushels, respectively.

The huge increases did take place after the war, when the prairies were settled by more immigrants, especially Scandinavians lured by lying advertising of a paradise and cheap but one-way train tickets. Nevertheless, before the war, the limited “west” - the area covered by the Northwest Ordinance - produced wheat and corn the way the south produced tobacco and cotton, far more than the U.S. alone needed.

42

No. Like Exapno said, substantial amounts of American grain were exported to Europe. By 1860, about an eighth of the wheat consumed in England was imported from the United States.

This was something the Confederates didn’t think about when they embargoed their cotton in an attempt to pressure England into diplomatic recognition. The United States had the potential to do the same thing with wheat and corn.

43

But England had taxes on imported corn (wheat) for much of the early 1800’s, so arguments about US import/export taxes would be less relevant to grain growing homesteaders. Their major preoccupation would be British taxes, and any additional significant export tax by the USA would price them out of any export markets. I assume there was no corresponding English import tax on cotton, since there were no local British cotton farmers to protect. This would make cotton much more lucrative.

44

It should be noted that the United States does not impose any export taxes. It seems they’re unconstitutional. Article 1, section 9, paragraph 5.

So any taxes under discussion will be protective import tariffs.

45

The short version: They couldn’t do the thing you suggest, and your understanding of the situation is wrong in at least one key way.

Only one of the parties competing was “proslavery” per se. This left them more or less completely unable to appeal outside of the Deep South. It is the true Border States* and Lower North (i.e., where Douglas and Bell received support) were not ready to vote Republican that day. However, Douglasites were not quite Free-Soil, but they also weren’t proslavery in the sense you mean. And Constitutional Unionists were more or a stop-gap non-party than a real political following, and their voters split with the Border States* ultimately staying in the Union.

*Excepting Virginia, both references.

The Democrats split, and the Constitutional Union party formed, to try and figure out an answer to that riddle, but in the end it couldn’t be done.

46

I’m nor sure we’re saying much different here. I was explicit that neither Douglas nor Bell ran on overtly pro-slavery tickets. And my point is exactly the same as yours.

A large block of the South were not ready to secede, despite the loud angry voices. That shows in the state conventions where the vote on secession was often surprisingly close. What they wanted was a chance to do what they had been doing for all of the 19th century: kick the can down the road and hope that some later generation would pick up the pieces.

That was no longer an option, however. The South was ready to leave as soon as the votes were counted if the Republicans won. Which they did, South Carolina leading the way before the year was out. (Which puts the lie to the Southern notion that the North forced them out and forced the war. That’s somewhat redundant: all Southern notions about the war to this day are lies.)

The real issue was, of course, slavery. Let’s not sugar coat the situation. Any vote that was not for a Republican was a vote to preserve slavery. That’s as much pro-slavery as a vote for Breckenridge.

47

No, we are not saying the same thing. There were four parties and four policy goals in the 1860 election. These were completely at odds and unification on the subject was not happening. However, ending slavery wasn’t part of the Republican platform in 1860, and by 1864, it was on the menu for War Democrats as well. Even many Copperheads didn’t particular care about maintaining slavery and wouldn’t lift a finger to do so.

48

All right, that makes it much easier. You’re completely wrong. Or at least completely missing the only important point. As I said:

That’s absolutely true. Moreover, nothing else about the election matters.

People understood what the issue of the day was. It was the perpetuation of slavery. Not state’s rights or tariffs or any of the other subterfuge that modern racists try to throw at people. I don’t understand your position at all. Seven slave states didn’t secede before Lincoln took office because they took seriously that “ending slavery wasn’t part of the Republican platform in 1860.” They knew that electing a Republican meant the end of slavery sooner rather than later. Everybody in the country knew that. All the people who voted for Bell and Douglas knew that. The one and only issue was slavery. Are you actually denying that?

49

You are factually incorrect in two significant ways. To wit: the issue in 1860 was the expansion of slavery, not its perpetuation.

(A) As an election, slavery was the most significant issue in 1860 but a wide body of other factors shaped it. Homesteading, a national bank, corruption and quite a few other factors played into the election. This is all well understood by historians and will be explained in most good books on the topic. History would indeed be neat and tidy if we could just boil it down to that one question, but we can’t. People don’t always vote in ways that create a clean, simple narrative. Now certainly, slavery was the most significant question and I would agree that it shaped the election in broad outlines, yet it’s just not that simple. Those issues pushed voters away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans on the margins, and the margins mattered immensely in 1860.

(B) Very few people in the North thought that a vote for Republicans realistically meant a vote for the end of slavery, and that was most definitely not why people were voting for them - at least in 1860. Longtime Abolitionists often sneered at the young party, which they considered entirely hostile to the rights of African-Americans. They had a reasonable point on the matter, but were also perhaps being overly purist. Now, some others joined the party in order to pressure it from within, and they had some success doing so over the course of the war. However, in a peaceful administration that process likely would have been slowed.

The main thrust of Republican politics was Free-Soil. Well into the Civil War Lincoln denied that he intended to destroy slavery per se, even when that had become the de facto policy of his government. [In my opinion, this was of a public stance which did not match his real goals, but Lincoln also understood the political and practical realities, but your mileage may vary.] Did this mean the end of slavery? Certainly not in any kind of plausible time frame. The Deep South believed it was so, perhaps, or at least they pretended they did. There is scant evidence, however, that anybody else agreed. [I personally, read a lot of their arguments to be rather too-obviously trying to convince themselves.] The Upper South, for instance, seems not to have been particularly panicked by Lincoln’s victory.

On the other hand, Douglas Democrats held not-too-dissimilar policies as Republicans in practice. Northern Democrats hadn’t quite given up hope of rebuilding their party, so they didn’t want to burn too many bridges, yet at the same time proslavery Southerners categorically rejected Douglas’s Popular Sovereignty, because they viewed it as being Free-Soil in practice regardless of what it was in theory. And, in the end, they didn’t vote for him.

Constitutional Unionists/Bell votes are a bit tricky to assess as proslavery or not, because they picked up a wide range of support across areas that went Union and Confederate, but appear to be negatively correlated with slaveholding. In practice, they represented the super-conservative side. But it’s very hard to read that as being pro-slavery in anything except the “Let’s all take a breath calm down a little!” sense when you have the C-U’s support mainly came from regions that passively or even actively rebelled opposed Confederacy.

50

An actual argument. Cool. We have so many posters who argue for the sake of arguing it’s refreshing to see a knowledgeable case made for a side. Thank you.

I don’t have time right now to compose my counterargument, but I’ll be back later on today.

51

Thanks to the contributors to this thread. It makes for interesting reading. I hope you continue.

So far, the main thing I’ve understood as regards my question is that rich Southerners and rich Northerners had conflicting interests concerning whether annexed territories would be free or slaver states. Rich southerners expected that free territories would decrease their power over the federal government, especially their ability to protect slavery and to prevent US industrial tariffs (which would be met by foreign agricultural tariffs that would hurt rich Southerners). Rich Northerners made common cause with a large number of “foot soldier” Northerners who opposed slavery for moral reasons. Rich Southerners made common cause with a large number of “foot soldier” Southerners who supported slavery for cultural/honor/traditional/sense of white supremacy reasons. Is that about right?

52

Our fundamental disagreement starts with this statement.

For the entire 19th century, the South had fought bitterly to maintain an equal number of slave states as free states so that the Senate was always balanced. That was behind all the capital letter issues in history books, The 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas offered that as a compromise in 1854 to promote northern railroad interests. To get it past the South, the bill repealed the Missouri Compromise banning slavery north of Missouri, leaving it to the settlers to decide later when the territories became states, popular sovereignty as the textbooks call it.

Both sides wound up hating the compromise, the North because it gave an opportunity for slavery where it had been banned and the South because early settlers were not likely to have any use for slaves on non-plantation farmland. They understood to their bones that every non-slave territory that became a state was fatal to their control. As soon as they lost the Senate, ending slavery was an achievable goal. Free-Soilers, who kept the name after the small third party of that name merged with the Republicans in 1854, also understood that blocking the expansion of slavery was the only way to destroy it. The result was five years of war commonly called Bleeding Kansas. John Brown’s 1856 massacre of proslavery men at Pottawatomie Creek was a call-to-arms for the South.

Provocations continued. The Dred Scott ruling in 1857 led Senator Jefferson Davis to demand “federal legislation to guarantee the extension of slavery in the territories” said Richard Kreitner in Break It Up: Secession, Division, and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 inflamed (always the word used) the South. Southerners saw militancy everywhere they looked. A group called the Wide Awakes (the woke people of today have ancestry) staged uniformed marches of thousands in every large city, even Democratic New York. Wikipedia has the best one-liner on them. “The Wide Awakes never marched anywhere in the South in 1860, but they represented the South’s greatest fear, an oppressive force bent on marching down to their lands, liberating the slaves, and pushing aside their way of life.” Dozens of slaves were lynched in Texas as a result. And politicians fanned the flames. William Seward made a crucial speech just before the 1858 Congressional elections, the “irrepressible conflict” argument that “a revolution has begun” and that “revolutions never go backwards.” The speech was reported everywhere and made him the leading candidate for 1860.

How did the South respond? The 1860 election was deliberately lost by the South in order to provoke the war. Quoting William C. Davis in his Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America.

If Southern Democrats refused to support the almost certain candidacy of Douglas in 1860, then their bolting from the party would hand the election to the exclusively Northern Republicans, and the election of a president who represented strictly sectional constituency could be enough to propel slave states into action.

There was nothing sophisticated in the scheme, nor was its operation a secret.

Far from being warring entities, the three non-Republican parties understood that their interests aligned. As Kreitner says, “A change of only a few thousand votes in New York could have swung the election.” That would have given Lincoln only 145 electoral votes with 152 needed to win. The election would have been thrown into the House, which the Republicans did not control. “At the last moment, Lincoln’s three opponents decided to form a “fusion” ticket to block the Republican in the state. Too little, too late.”

In short, there is little question that the issue of slavery was foremost on everyone’s mind and the country was split between those wanting to preserve it and those wanting to end it, despite the usual block of fingers-in-the-ears “we can’t hear you” in the middle. The 1860 election would decide the future of slavery in the country. It was designed to do so and achieved that goal, if not the way anyone thought would be the outcome.

53

And also probably because of a cruel calculus. Slaves were expensive and valuable pieces of property and it just makes good business sense not to work them to death. Take your car, for example. It is inanimate and you have no human sympathy for it, but you still change the oil, the tires, spark plugs, etc. because it is more economical for you to take care of the car instead of running it until it dies. I would think (no cite) that the same theory would apply to slaves.

54

Being able to afford a domestic worker was one of the signs that you were middle class, in the late Victorian age. Unless one in five Chicago households in 1870 were upper class, it very much was a middle class thing.

55

One in five households (in one city) hardly equates to “most”, even if one makes the unwarranted assumption that every one of those households was middle class.

From your link: “In late nineteenth-century Chicago, domestic work was increasingly performed by Irish,German, Scandinavian, and Polish women.”

Nothing there about white Northerners or Chicagoans in particular being eager for slavery to end so that they could hire cheap domestic labor from the ranks of freed blacks.

56

Of interest may be a thread I started 15 years ago asking how long slavery in the US would have continued had there been no Civil War. Interestingly, most were of the opinion that it was a broken economic model and not profitable enough to have continued for much longer and likely would have collapsed on its own within a decade or two.

57

I am making the assumption that most of the newly-industrialized city was working class, not middle class. Feel free to prove me wrong.

So 1/5 of all would represent a sizeable fraction of the middle and upper class. And it’s not about “most of the city”, but “most of the middle class”.

And are you making a case that Chicago is somehow not representative of large Northern cities with your “in one city” parenthetical?

I didn’t say they were (or weren’t). I said not word one about ethnicity.

I am just disputing that having a domestic worker was not a common middle class thing. Because it completely was. It’s not like they were expensive to hire, or had to be treated particularly well.

58

It doesn’t work that way.

It’s not my (or anyone’s) job to take dubious assumptions that have little or nothing factual backing and prove them wrong.

The onus is on those who make such claims.

To repeat the obvious, one-fifth of anything does not equate to most.

59

That would be a great argument - if the original point had been that most households couldn’t have servants, not that most middle-class households couldn’t. I’m not saying 1/5 of Chicago was most of Chicago, I’m saying 1/5 of Chicago was most of its middle class (and a smattering of upper, of course).

Either you’re arguing that some large fraction (>40%) of 1870 Chicagoan households were middle class, or you’re saying that, of the 1/5th that did keep servants, most (i.e. more than half) were upper class (i.e that >10% of Chicagoan households were upper class in 1870). Both are obviously ridiculous arguments.

Or is there some other argument you’re making?

60

Maybe we’ve run into the difference in the definition of “middle class” between the US/Canada and some other countries.

In my experience Americans think 70% of the population is middle class. Including most of the top 10% income/wealth level and down to the 25th percentile.

At least in the UK middle class means something like the 80th percentile to the 95th.