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Time for another Civil War clarifying moment.

The objection to cheaper workers was the primary reason why Northern laborers hated slavery. It was an economic argument for the vast majority of working people in the 1850s. They didn't want slaves taking their jobs. They saw them as an economic threat.

I used to not comprehend this. All my life I had been told that people hated slavery for "moral" reasons. As with all the best lies, it contains enough truth to make it believable.

There were indeed Northerners who hated slavery because they saw it as morally wrong. We are all taught to believe these people made up the vast majority of people in the North who opposed slavery. They were not the majority. They were in fact a tiny minority of the people who hated slavery.

When I started researching the runup to the civil war, I found out very curious things. I kept finding evidence that the Northern white people *HATED* black people. They hated them to an irrational degree. They passed laws to keep them out of their states. They passed laws to punish them for not having their papers. They passed laws that allowed any white men in the state to capture and sell them into slavery in the south. Lincoln himself wanted them all out of the country.

My first thought was "Wait! This doesn't make any sense! How can you hate black people so much, and then fight a war to give them their freedom?"

Took me a long time to realize they both hated black people, and hated "free labor", meaning labor that people didn't have to pay wages.

So with this thread about Hb-1 Visas, we have a similar situation. There are two aspects to this. People don't want the cheap labor competition, and a lot of people, though they won't say so, don't want brown people coming here who are very different culturally.

It is like the lead up to the Civil War all over again, and regarding the same issues.

Unfair labor practices coupled with a general disdain for members of another race with their practices that many Americans regard as abhorrent and disgusting.

I just want to point out to those willing to listen that history doesn't exactly repeat, but it often rhymes with previous history. And here we are again.

Same sh*t, different Century.

Bans on African-Americans coming into states weren't enforced much. Some sheriffs might tell black arrivals to push off to the next town, but black populations in states with bans still continued to grow.

Attempts to bring runaways back to the slave states were often fought against by Northerners. You've even said that by the Constitution, slaveowners could send slave catchers North to recover their slaves. Now you complain that Northerners passed laws allowing them to do so. No such laws were needed. What Southern slaveowners objected to was laws that didn't allow them to reclaim their runaway slaves.

Northern laws restricting African-Americans’ movements mirrored Southern laws to the same effect. If you were black you definitely didn't want to be out and about in a strange place without your papers in a slave state. I don't now how dangerous that would be in a free state.

You also seem to be talking like there's something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to lose their jobs to foreigners imported here by wealthy corporations, or something morally wrong about Americans not wanting to see a major transformation of their culture by new arrivals brought here because they are willing to work cheap and are regarded as docile and easily controlled. Every nation has immigration laws to deal with those same concerns. You are naive and don't live in the real world.

Good post.

IMHO the northern opposition to slavery had multiple reasons. Some of it was purely moral (the 2nd Great Awakening was real). Some of it was economic, very much like our current argument against illegal immigration. And some of it was faux morality (i.e. The loud talkers up north looking for excuses to point out other peoples' sins and that would be southerners having a lot more slaves than the north). I see that both from northern arguments as well as abolitionist / pro-union arguments in the south (i.e. northern Alabama). For example, as both a Christian and a descendant of abolitionists/pro-Unionists in Alabama, I'd love to tell you that my ancestors were all about loving God and loving people. But the truth is that, at least as much as for moral reasons, they hated that their small farms had to complete with large plantations further south that used somewhat free labor (slavery did have costs to the slave owners) and, therefore, could sell crops cheaper than the non-slave farms could.

Don't forget another reason: the north didn't like the southern states having slaves counted in the census (even at just 3/5ths).

On the other hand, we shouldn't go too far in the other direction and promote the lie of the Lost Cause as the reason the southern states seceded. If you read each confederate state's declaration of secession you'll see slavery listed in almost every state's declaration, often repeatedly. So just like FReeper DiogenesLamp is right that the north's abolitionist movement wasn't all angelic, it's not like the south's secession motivation was all about liberty and states' rights.

DiogenesLamp: "The objection to cheaper workers was the primary reason why Northern laborers hated slavery.
It was an economic argument for the vast majority of working people in the 1850s.
They didn't want slaves taking their jobs.
They saw them as an economic threat."

The key point to understand about Abolitionism is that it did not suddenly arrive full blown -- like Athena from the mind of Zeus -- but rather, Abolitionism grew and gestated gradually, over many decades, beginning with:

1776 -- Immaculate Conception in our Enlightenment Era Founders' philosophical devotion to natural law, as expressed in their Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."
Now DiogenesLamp claims those were merely meaningless "fancy words" which nobody then took literally or intended to apply to slavery.
That is not true, many took those words seriously, including Southerners like Jefferson, Madison, Handcock and Washington, and did what they could to eliminate or restrict slavery when possible.
1790 -- Christian Revival, the Second Great Awakening beginning in 1790, sparked numerous social reform movements, including temperance, abolition of slavery, and women's suffrage.
In the South it led to the teaching of Christianity to slaves and black freemen.
One such Sunday School teacher was Thomas J. Jackson, later to earn the sobriquet "stonewall".
1854 -- Third Party System, downstream from culture, by 1854 abolitionism helped destroy the Second Party System (Democrats & Whigs) and replace it with the Third Party System (Republicans and Democrats).
1840-1860 -- Southern Political Expansionism -- in decades before 1860, Southerners became increasingly aggressive, expanding slavery and slavery's influence on states beyond the Old South.
These included western territories like Kansas, New Mexico and California, but also key political changes such as the 1850 Compromise, which Federalized slavecatching throughout the North, and the 1857 SCOTUS Dred-Scott ruling, which increased slavers' "Right of Sojourn" in anti-slavery states.
post 1857 -- Economic Concerns, such as the actual loss of Northern jobs to Southern slaves, were not manifest (meaning, it never happened) but were feared a theoretical possibility to be avoided.
Hence the strong Northern reaction to the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott Decision, and the rapid growth of the Republican party between 1856 and 1860.

DiogenesLamp: " All my life I had been told that people hated slavery for "moral" reasons.
As with all the best lies, it contains enough truth to make it believable."

The fear of Southern slaves taking away Northern jobs only became theoretically possible after the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott ruling.
However, Dred Scott is arguably what flipped half a million northern voters and 7 northern states from pro-slavery Democrats to anti-slavery Republicans.

"We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.

"To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty, is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.
This is what we have to do."
A. Lincoln, June 16, 1858, "House Divided Speech""

SCOTUS -- Crazy Roger Taney's -- 1857 Dred Scott ruling is what turned many Northern slavery-friendly Democrats into anti-slavery Republicans.