expecting it to be abolished through a program of gradual emancipation as had begun in the northThe North's gradual emancipation was just moving freedman elsewhere. They didn't want Blacks in their cities and were just as happy to relocate them overseas or to the western territories. The north abandoned the system of chattel slavery for industrial sweatshops. They sold their slaves South to the agrarian class when it was convenient and only after they made profit on the slave trade.
Cute. Yes, the north was just as racist as the south. They didn't want blacks living among them. Yes, they industrialized and mercilessly exploited workers, many of them immigrants.Are you going to actually make the old slaveowners' argument that slavery was good for blacks? That it was more kindly, or at least comparable in its harshness to sweatshop work?
One more time: why did the South want to expand slavery?