I’m not sure the northern states ever tired of slavery. Massachusetts never enacted any laws against slavery. It was only outlawed there when the Civil Rights Act passed in the 60’s. The 1960’s that is.
The north was making too much money using southern cotton to weave fabric up in the New England mills. To do that they needed to enslave children as young as 6 years old to work in the mills.
The north was making too much money off the onerous tariffs they enacted so four southern states were paying 90% of that federal income. Those were the days before income tax so the north was getting a free ride off the southern productivity.
The emancipation proclamation only freed Southern slaves. The Union slaves were kept enslaved.
And BTW there were thousands of black slaver owners who didn’t want slavery to end. But they were southerners so...
Where do you people come up with this stuff?!
In fact, according to this source, Massachusetts was the first state to free all its slaves, in 1783, through a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, enforcing the 1780 Massachusetts constitution.
By the time of the US Constitutional Convention in 1787, five other states had begun gradual abolition of slavery: Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
New York began abolition in 1799, New Jersey in 1804.
ladyjane: "The north was making too much money using southern cotton to weave fabric up in the New England mills.
To do that they needed to enslave children as young as 6 years old to work in the mills."
Yes, some have argued that Northern "wage slavery" conditions were as bad, or worse than Southern African-slavery.
But there was no law holding a certain race of people in "wage slavery" -- so, many could and did, eventually, move west for a better life.
But, it's certainly true that the entire nation benefitted from exports of cotton grown by Southern slaves.
That hugely explains why, before the 1850s era Republicans, there had never been an anti-slavery political party -- not Whigs, nor Federalists and certainly not Northern Democrats.
ladyjane: "The north was making too much money off the onerous tariffs they enacted so four southern states were paying 90% of that federal income."
PeaRidge supports this claim in post #865, but I've never seen numbers supporting PeaRidge's analysis, and, I notice he's made a simple math error too ($198 million divided by $279 million = 71%, still too high, but not 87% as PeaRidge asserts).
First of all, this report from the time shows:
The exact number for 1860 cotton exports is $192 million, about which this report says:
And that number suggests total exports of $315 million, which is supported by this report from 1897.
Indeed, enumerated Southern exports for 1860 were:
So, what were the balance of US 1860 exports?
Bottom line: there is absolutely no denying that King Cotton ruled in 1860, but it was at roughly 50%, not 90% of our total exports.
That means, yes, large Southern cotton planters' slaves did contribute a disproportionate share to the national income.
But they were certainly not the only contributors, and in fact, after 1860, when the nation needed other income sources to make up for Southern cotton, those sources were readily found.
ladyjane: "The emancipation proclamation only freed Southern slaves.
The Union slaves were kept enslaved."
Sorry, but I don't "get" it, why do you people think that us such a clever comment to make?
Don't you know that soon after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Congressional Republicans began submitting bills for a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery entirely.
That amendment passed Congress in early 1865, and was fully ratified by the states in December 1865.
So why do you think it's so clever to point out that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only did what he was constitutionally allowed?
ladyjane: "And BTW there were thousands of black slaver owners who didn’t want slavery to end.
But they were southerners so..."
In 1860, of 400,000 total Southern slave-holders with 4 million slaves, about 4,000 were blacks = one percent, holding roughly 13,000 slaves = 3 tenths of one percent of all slaves.
The largest concentration of black slave-holders was Louisiana, which was mostly under Union control during the war, and so those slaves would have been freed early on.
Louisiana also supplied dozens of black regiments -- nearly 25,000 black troops -- to the Union Army, so clearly the idea of freedom was not something they objected strongly to.