Off your meds, huh dude? Slavery was abolished in the North in 1804. You Rebs went to war to preserve it.
Second of all, the Union was preserving it, so nobody had to fight for that. See Lincoln and "Corwin Amendment."
“Off your meds, huh dude? Slavery was abolished in the North in 1804. You Rebs went to war to preserve it.”
Connecticut:
“Emancipation bills were rejected by the Connecticut Legislature in 1777, 1779, and 1780. Connecticut lawmakers did, however, in 1774 pass a law to halt the importation of slaves (”whereas the increase of slaves in this Colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient ....”).
“As in other Northern states, gradual emancipation freed no slaves at once. It simply set up slavery for a long-term natural death. Connecticut finally abolished slavery entirely in 1848. The 1800 census counted 951 Connecticut slaves; the number diminished thereafter to 25 in 1830, but then inexplicably rose to 54 in the 1840 census. After that, slaves were no longer counted in censuses for the northern states.”
http://slavenorth.com/connecticut.htm
Rhode Island:
“During the Revolution, Quaker abolitionists and the powerful Newport shipping interest clashed over slavery. In February 1784 the Legislature passed a compromise measure for gradual emancipation. All children of slaves born after March 1 were to be “apprentices,” the girls to become free at 18, the boys at 21. As with other Northern instances of gradual emancipation, this gave slaveowners many years of service to recoup the cost of raising the children.
“No slaves were emancipated outright. The 1800 census listed 384 slaves, and the number fell gradually to 5 in 1840, after which slaves were no longer counted in the censuses for the state. And, in an essential element of the 1784 compromise, the right of Rhode Island ship-owners to participate in the foreign slave trade was undisturbed.
“Legislation against slave-trading proved difficult to enforce in Rhode Island. John Brown, a merchant, state representative, and powerful slaveholder, was tried in 1796 for violating the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited ships destined to transport slaves to any foreign country from outfitting in American ports. He was found not guilty.
“As was the case throughout the North, Rhode Island, having ended slavery, also sought to make it difficult for blacks to remain in the state or move there. In the early 19th century, Rhode Island towns especially turned to the old New England custom of “warning out” strangers to purify themselves racially. The custom continued to have as a stated goal the removal of poor and undesirable strangers from a community. But blacks were increasingly its targets, out of proportion to their numbers and without regard to whether they were long-term residents or not.
http://slavenorth.com/rhodeisland.htm
Pennsylvania:
“The law for gradual emancipation in Pennsylvania passed on February 1780, and that’s when the Mason-Dixon line began to acquire its metaphoric meaning as the boundary between North and South. But the law was no proclamation of emancipation. It was deeply conservative. The 6,000 or so Pennsylvania slaves in 1780 stayed slaves. Even those born a few days before the passage of the act had to wait 28 years before the law set them free. This allowed their masters to recoup the cost of raising them.
The abolition bill was made more restrictive during the debates over it — it originally freed daughters of slave women at 18, sons at 21. By the time it passed, it was upped to a flat 28. That meant it was possible for a Pennsylvania slave’s daughter born in February 1780 to live her life in bondage, and if she had a child at 40, the child would remain a slave until 1848. There’s no record of this happening, but the “emancipation” law allowed it. It was, as the title of one article has it, “philanthropy at bargain prices.”
The act that abolished slavery in Pennsylvania freed no slaves outright, and relics of slavery may have lingered in the state almost until the Civil War. There were 795 slaves in Pennsylvania in 1810, 211 in 1820, 403 or 386 (the count was disputed) in 1830, and 64 in 1840, the last year census worksheets in the northern states included a line for “slaves.”
http://slavenorth.com/pennsylvania.htm
Delaware:
“Delaware had, proportionally, the largest free black population of any state. This was not merely a statistical abstraction, but it was known and commented upon by the people in Delaware at the time, as in the Wilmington newspaper of 1850 that noted that Delaware “has more free colored in proportion to its population than any state in the Union.”
“White employers relied on free blacks for labor, and, like Maryland, Delaware took a coercive stance toward its free black population. An 1849 law threatened to sell free blacks into servitude for a year if they were “idle and poor” and remained unemployed. Blacks had been barred from state-aided schools as far back as 1821. In 1832, not long after Nat Turner’s rebellion, the General Assembly began to pass “black codes” to control the lives and activities of freedmen. Soon these harsh rules made Delaware “the least hospitable place in the Union for freedmen prior to the Civil War.”The result was a migration of Delaware blacks northward in the 1850s.
“An attempt to abolish slavery in the new state constitution in 1792 failed. Bills to abolish slavery were introduced in the General Assembly in 1796 and ‘97. An attempt at gradual emancipation in 1803 was killed by the speaker of the state House of Representatives, who cast the tiebreaking vote. Further attempts were made, but the abolition bills generally were smothered or starved in parliamentary procedure. By this time, the pattern had been established of anti-slavery New Castle County in the north vs. pro-slavery Sussex County in the south.
“An 1845 bill for gradual abolition was “indefinitely postponed,” but in 1847 a gradual emancipation bill that would have freed all African-Americans born into slavery after 1850 made it out of committee, with a recommendation of approval on economic grounds. Industrial Wilmington was eager to keep up with its bigger rivals, and the Northern political rhetoric of the times held that free laboring men, working to better their condition in factories or on farms, were the key to a region’s prosperity. The committee report warned that “the carelessness, slovenly and unproductive husbandry visible in some parts of our state, undoubtedly result mainly from the habit of depending on slave labor. It is no longer a disputable question that slave labor impoverishes, while free labor enriches people.”
“The House passed the bill, by a vote of 12 to 8 (this is Delaware, remember: things happen on a very small scale). But it was tabled in the state Senate by one vote. Ironically, the deciding vote against it was cast by a senator who probably lived in Pennsylvania, in an area where the Mason-Dixon survey had left the boundary doubtful: a small spike of land that technically belonged to Pennsylvania but traditionally had been administered by Delaware.
http://slavenorth.com/delaware.htm