That is incorrect. Blacks and mulattos were segregated as inferior in the antebellum North, and even restricted from entering at least one state. This is McPherson tip-toeing around Northern racism:
"ONE of the most formidable obstacles to the abolition of slavery and the extension of equal rights to free Negroes was the widespread popular and scientific belief, North as well as South, in the innate inferiority of the Negro race. Most white Americans took it for granted that Negroes were by nature shiftless, slovenly, childlike, savage, and incapable of assimilation as equals into white society. Since the beginning of the antislavery movement abolitionists had been confronted by arguments that Negroes belonged to a separate and inferior species of mankind; that they would work only under compulsion; that they could not take care of themselves in freedom and would revert to barbarism; and that emancipation would bring economic and social ruin to the South and the nation." [The Negro: Innately Inferior Or equal? in James M. McPherson, "The Struggle For Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction." Princeton University Press, 2014, Chap.VI, p.251]
This is de Tocqueville pulling no punches:
"Until now, wherever whites have been the most powerful, they have held Negroes in degradation or in slavery. Wherever Negroes have been the strongest, they have destroyed whites; it is the only accounting that might ever be possible between the two races.
"If I consider the United States of our day, I see clearly that in a certain part of the country the legal barrier that separates the two races is tending to fall, but not that of mores. I see slavery receding; the prejudice to which it gave birth is immovable.
"In the part of the Union where Negroes are no longer slaves, have they drawn nearer to whites? Every man who has lived in the United States will have noted that an opposite effect has been produced. [{In no part of the Union are the two races as separated as in New [England (ed.)] [v: the North].}]
"Racial prejudice seems to me stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists, and nowhere does it appear as intolerant as in the states where servitude has always been unknown.
"It is true that in the North of the Union the law allows Negroes and whites to contract legitimate unions; but opinion declares vile the white who joins in marriage with a Negro woman; and it would be difficult to cite an example of such a deed.
"In nearly all the states where slavery is abolished, the Negro has been given electoral rights; but if he presents himself to vote, he risks his life. Oppressed, he can make a complaint, but he finds only whites among his judges. The law opens the juror 's seat to him, but prejudice pushes him away from it. His son is excluded from the school where the descendant of the European goes to be instructed. In the theaters he cannot, even at the price of gold, buy the right to sit next to the one who was his master; in the hospitals he lies apart. The Black is allowed to beseech the same God as the whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his priests and his churches. The gates of heaven are not closed to him: but inequality scarcely stops at the edge of the other world. When the Negro is no more, his bones are thrown aside, and the difference in conditions is found again even in the equality of death.
"Thus the Negro is free, but he is not able to share either the rights or the pleasures or the labors or the pains or even the tomb of the one whose equal he has been declared to be; he cannot meet him anywhere, either in life or in death.
"[{What miserable mockery this is.}]
"In the South where slavery still exists, Negroes are less carefully kept aside; they sometimes share the labors of whites and their pleasures; to a certain point they are permitted to mix with them. Legislation ismore harsh in their regard; habits are more tolerant and milder. In the South the master is not afraid to raise his slave up to his level, because he knows that if he wishes he will always be able to throw him back into the dust. In the North the white no longer distinctly sees the barrier that should separate him from a degraded race, and he withdraws with all the more care from the Negro because he fears that someday he will merge with him.
"With the American of the South, nature sometimes reasserts its rights and for a moment reestablishes equality between Blacks and whites. In the North pride silences even the most imperious passion of man. The American of the North would perhaps consent to make the Negro woman the temporary companion of his pleasures if the legislators had declared that she must not aspire to share his bed; but she is able to become his wife, and he withdraws from her with a kind of horror.
"This is how in the United States the prejudice that pushes Negroes away seems to increase proportionately as Negroes cease to be slaves, and how inequality becomes imprinted in the mores as it fades in the laws. But if the relative position of the two races that inhabit the United States is as I have just shown, why have the Americans abolished slavery in the north of the Union, why do they keep it in the south, and what causes them to aggravate its rigors there?
"It is easy to answer. Slavery is being destroyed in the United States not in the interest of the Negroes, but in that of the whites."
[Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America." 2010, pp.553-556]
Lincolnites are forever burdened with having to hide or tip-toe around the black mark of Northern racism. The Cato Institute avoids it in this article, but did not hide Lincoln's involvement:
"['Southerners'] endorsed numerous out-and-out racist ideas, including the idea that blacks were less than human and that whites had not just the authority but even the responsibility to hold them as slaves. Lincoln, oddly enough, apparently shared some of these views. In his 1860 inaugural address, he said: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Two years later, President Lincoln wrote: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union (Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862). "And in 1858 Lincoln had written: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." [Tibor R. Machan, "Lincoln, Secession and Slavery." CATO Institute, June 1, 2002]
Lincoln's speeches are loaded with white supremacy; and until his dying days he planned and schemed to colonize the blacks.
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>>OIFVeteran wrote: "Now during the war the United States added the goal of freeing those Americans held in bondage. Lincoln only had the constitutional authority to do this in states that were in rebellion. But he worked with congress to pass an amendment to get rid of slavery forever. Just as current pro-life people would like to pass a constitutional amendment saying life begins at conception to ban abortion forever."
That is misleading. Lincoln espoused full support for slavery in his First Inaugural, and soon introduced and promoted what became known as the Corwin Amendment to forever protect slavery:
"The following amendment to the Constitution (Corwin Amendment) relating to slavery was proposed by the 2d session of the Thirty-sixth Congress on March 2, 1861, when it passed the Senate, having previously passed the House on February 28, 1861. It is interesting to note in this connection that this is the only proposed (and not ratified) amendment to the Constitution to have been signed by the President. The President 's signature is considered unnecessary because of the constitutional provision that on the concurrence of two-thirds of both Houses of Congress the proposal shall be submitted to the States for ratification.
"Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the following article be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which, when ratified by three-fourths of said Legislatures, shall be valid, to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution, viz:
Article Thirteen
"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
[Presented By Mr. Brady Of Pennsylvania July 25, 2007, in "The Constitution of the United States of America as Amended: Unratified Amendments, Analytical Index." U. S. Government Printing Office, 2007, pp.29-30]
That 13th Amendment failed to pass.
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>>OIFVeteran wrote: "Now the southern democrats claimed to be fighting for freedom, just as current democrats claim to be fighting for “choice”. But they were really fighting for the right to own other humans, just as democrats are really fighting for the right to kill children."
The first part is revisionist history. If you take the time to read reports from the battlefields, you will realize that most southern soldiers believed they were fighting for freedom against an invading tyrant. Of course, most southerners did not own slaves, nor benefitted from them.
Mr. Kalamata
Nice side step of my analogy with irrelevant arguments. Nowhere did I say the north was not racist. Most people in America were. However if we were to quantify the morality of the population on the subject of slavery in this period most peoples moral compass would say that the abolitionist who advocated total equality between the races were most morally correct( let’s mark that as our top of the scale, say a ten).
Lincoln with his often expressed belief that all men everywhere should be free would be a 7-8.
And the confederates/slave owners who ran the confederacy and believed that blacks were ordained by God to be slaves would be a 1. Or most morally wrong.
If racism really bother you that much you must really hate the leaders of the confederacy.