DiogenesLamp quoting Dickens:
"Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro..." Totally false, but what is true is that Dickens himself hated the North and loved the South.
So Dickens' report on the Civil War should no more be taken as gospel than, say, a Nancy Pelosi report on "Dreamer" legislation.
"Many scholars have noted the paradox between Dickens' support for various liberal causes and his racism, nationalist chauvinism and imperialist mentality.
Biographer Peter Ackroyd in his 1990 biography of Dickens (the 2nd of four books on Dickens) duly notes Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, campaigns for sanitation reform, and opposition to capital punishment.
He also asserts that 'In modern terminology Dickens was a ''racist'' of the most egregious kind, a fact that ought to give pause to those who persist in believing that he was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century.'[5]
Ackroyd also notes that Dickens did not believe that the North in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the South for that reason."
Dickens was influenced by Thomas Carlyle, who hated the abuses of industrial society, but believed in a more authoritarian way of government. I'm not saying Dickens followed Carlyle in everything, but he may have subconsciously picked up some of Carlyle's political attitudes along with Carlyle's moralistic fervor.
Also, it was common for the English to admire the more deferential Southern culture than the brasher, more individualistic, "pushy" Northern culture. Though Dickens had been poor, he liked the comfortable middle class environment he'd entered and picked up some of their gentry ways.
Finally, just about everybody in England or America back then would be considered "racist" by today's standards. Whether or not Britons protested against American slavery, they had their own attitudes about the Irish, the Indians, the Africans, and the Chinese. It would be hard to find anybody who didn't.
Anyway, Dickens wasn't the best judge or commentator when it came to American matters.
Totally false, but what is true is that Dickens himself hated the North and loved the South. You should read Dicken's castigation of the Southerners who owned slaves. He is quite vicious to them. You do know that Dickens was himself an abolitionist?
He had no sympathy for slave owners, he abhorred slavery. He was just telling the truth. The Squabble between the North and South was over who was going to collect and spend all that slave produced money.