[Tell It Right]

Agreed. In many ways the Dims' push for cheap illegal labor looks a lot like their past push for slave labor. They say it helps the immigrant workers, just like the pro-slavery mantra claimed to do. And it hurts Americans looking for good paying work.

As much as I'd like to claim that the abolitionists in north Alabama (including my ancestors) were driven solely by love of God and man, I'll admit that the farmer class that my family was in was driven at least as much by not liking to compete with slave labor. My family (the norm for north Alabama) didn't have enough good land for large plantations, so we didn't own slaves (slavery was practically non-existent there). The large plantation owners were mostly in the southern half of the state (see secession vote results by count at https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9yjb00/american_civil_war_secession_votes_by_county/).

The non-slave owning farmers saw the plantation owners as cheating by having cheap slave labor to lower crop prices. Much like today's American businesses and workers see cheap illegal immigrant labor (as well as legal immigrant labor like H1B's).

[Regulator]

” I’ll admit that the farmer class that my family was in was driven at least as much by not liking to compete with slave labor”

That was the entire motivation for much of the Mid-Western North. Pre-War, Indiana had a bond requirement for black people:

https://www.in.gov/history/for-educators/download-issues-of-the-indiana-historian/indiana-emigrants-to-liberia/being-black-in-indiana/

How many freedmen could afford a $500 bond?

So uh, where was all the vaunted concern over the status of non-Whites?

There wasn’t any. When they went to war, it was about eliminating competition from slave labor.