I disagree that the ports in the North were entrepots of the slave trade, however Yankee the hulls and masters may have been. (One of Carolina secession advocate Robert Rhett's serial beeves was that the Carolina shipbuilding trade had all but vanished by the end of the 18th century, the trade monopolized by Yankee yards. Which, if it happened, warrants academic investigation. It might have been an example of "comparative advantage" .... or it might have been an example of Yankees being yankeefied. Every contemporary group that dealt with them extensively had a low opinion of New England Yankees except the Yankees themselves ..... that alone is worth a scholarly book.)
But you've put your finger on something that has engaged my curiosity for ten years now.
What was the degree of merchant and banking/banker/"bankster" motivation in the development of the political issues and parties -- Free Soil, Whig, Republican -- that polarized the country regionally and led to the onset of civil war (using the term "civil war" advisedly)?
Someone needs to do a massive investigation of old newspaper morgues, business and leading-family correspondence, and political figures' letter files in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other Yankee "opinion leadership" circles. I think that there they will find the smoking gun that killed a million people and the Framers' noble American Experiment, and supplanted it with a banker's paradise of imperial, centralized, centripetal, gradually totalitarianizing government.
It all started with a fellow named Hamilton and his British mercantile masters before the Constitution was even written.
Still peddling that Marxist line? Obviously that explains why such hotbeds of finance capitalism as Ripon WI, Jackson MI, Crawfordsville IN, lay claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party. But wait, so does Exeter NH, and Phillips Academy is there, so you must be right. But of course it was farmers and shopkeepers who set the movement in motion that created the Republican Party, not bankers or "banksters."
The truth is that classes don't act, people do. You can find wealthy abolitionists who contributed to anti-slavery activism, but most merchants, bankers, and manufacturers were terrified of anything that could hurt business. There were more "Cotton Whigs" than "Conscience Whigs" in wealthy circles of New England. The old, established families in Philadelphia and New York felt close to their Southern cousins, and many if not most of them had made their way over to the Democratic Party.
So, no, there wasn't some evil conspiracy to "kill a million people and the Framers' noble American Experiment, and supplant it with a banker's paradise of imperial, centralized, centripetal, gradually totalitarianizing government." Once again, just like a hundred times in the past, you're attributing what you think came about after the war, to someone's intention before the war.
That sort of thing gets repetitive and annoying pretty quickly, but it's similar to what Charles Beard and others were doing a century ago. They hated the bankers and corporations of their day more than anything, so they assumed that all of American history was a struggle against the moneyed interests who descended in a line from the Federalists, through the Whigs to the Republicans. The problem is that there were powerful interests on the other side as well, and not all the oppression or misery in the country could be laid at the door of Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans.
The opposition you see between the Founders and the post-Civil War Republicans, though, is one Beard wouldn't share. For him, Lincoln and what came after was a continuation the elitist schemes of the Founders themselves. Without giving that interpretation Beard's evil spin, there is something to be said for it: it's hard to believe that George Washington really would have been in favor of bickering state elites breaking up the union he had worked so hard to establish.
This is interesting..
“Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small.
All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so.
And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also,
the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.
I could wish their Numbers were increased.
And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People?
why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?
But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind”
Ben Franklin
Comparative advantage would be correct. I'd say first of all were the geographic and climatic factors. New England had many fine natural harbors, and easy access to hardwoods needed for shipbuilding. The second was the relatively poor rocky soil and long winters of New England vs. the rich soil and longer growing season of the south.
In New England, capital tended to flow to shipping and mercantile activities while in the South capital tended to flow to large agricultural ventures.
Those factors did lead to different attitudes with different economic incentives.
I think that there they will find the smoking gun that killed a million people and the Framers’ noble American Experiment, and supplanted it with a banker’s paradise of imperial, centralized, centripetal, gradually totalitarianizing government.
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BINGO!