"Fair"?! But the only money "the North" ever "took" from "the South" were payments for goods & services freely contracted at, we must presume, the best available prices.
You simply cannot insult all Southerners by claiming they would ignore a better price, if they could get one.
The truth is that 5.5 million Confederate state whites paid the same prices for their goods & services, differing only in transportation costs, as did 22 million Union state whites.
Indeed, it's been said Southerners paid less for financial-type services than other Americans because Southern incomes were more stable & reliable.
Albion Wilde: "If the south could have retained more of the profit from their crops, they may have been able to free or indenture their enslaved workers, paying, housing and feeding them for the season. "
Of course you know what "profit" is, right?
It's revenues minus expenses and in business nearly all expenses are freely contracted for based on the best combinations of quality, delivery and price.
And you well know that many Southerners were & are frugal by nature and so eventually grew very wealthy, while many others wanted to look wealthy even when they weren't, and so fell into poverty -- that's just human nature, has nothing to do with tariffs from Washington, DC.
As for freeing their slaves through indentures, that was done a lot, especially in Border States where slavery itself was marginal economically.
In Border States like Maryland about half of African Americans were freedmen.
However... however... freeing slaves was done much less in Deep South states where slavery was seriously profitable and slaves in great demand.
Albion Wilde: "Instead, southern agriproducers were being gouged by northern profiteers whose preachers and editors grabbed the moral high ground, the same way today's power-thieves yell "racist!" whenever they don't get their way."
"Profiteers and preachers"? I don't think so.
The fact is, you have no idea how many of these "profiteers" were Southerners themselves, or were, for example, British merchants & financiers investing in reliable American business opportunities.
But Northerners in Pittsburgh who manufactured & sold, for example, iron stoves, charged the same prices to their Southern customers as they did to those in, for example Wisconsin. Profiteering? Naw, that's just Confederate propaganda.
As for "preachers", yes, that is a different story, the truth is Northerners did first learn abolitionism in their churches.
But when they tried to "export" their new abolitionist ideas to the South, they were met with a solid wall of resistance -- no books, pamphlets or newspapers advocating abolition were ever allowed in the antebellum South.
Albion Wilde: "We can't go back and do it again. But the north can stop moral preening over the history of U.S. slavery."
Nobody on Free Republic is moral preening over US slavery, but neither do we ignore or lie about basic facts, which seems to be the stock-in-trade of our Southern Democrat pro-Confederates.
Albion Wilde: "Whereupon northerners passed red line real estate laws, segregation schemes and all kinds of mess that helped us get to where we are today -- a large subculture of angry, lawless, fatherless people constantly spoiling for a fight.
But all the racism is blamed on the south."
The truth of this matter is, there's only one real reason we have so many "racism" allegations -- institutional, systemic or otherwise -- that's because it's incredibly profitable politically and economically for our racism-industry to ignore the facts and keep up unrelenting pressure on guilty-feeling white liberals, "progressives" & "woke" activists.
"Racism" will end when race hustlers can no longer make a living off it and people can get on with their lives in peace.
And that will happen when? Probably the same day that heck freezes over...