“Their view of blacks was even worse.”
No. When the army of occupation arrived in the South, the officers’ ladies complained that they could not find good servants.
When the Southern ladies recommended their ex-slaves, the officers’ ladies recoiled in horror at the thought of “darkies” in their houses.
Apocryphal tales do not bolster your case, and facts say otherwise. Blacks in the South, free or slave, had no rights. Free blacks were limited in most states in what occupations they could work at. They could not meet in groups in most states, could not be educated in any of the states, were not free to live where they chose, certainly could not vote or serve on juries. Most Southern states placed restrictions on slave emancipation, and some like Virginia mandated that freed slaves had to leave the state entirely if freed. And since your knee-jerk reaction will be to say that the Northern states were no better in many respects, I will cut you off and say that I agree with that. But your claim is that the North was worse, not that the North was as bad. And since blacks did not have the same restrictions in most Northern states and that they were not bought and sold, then the evidence still says they were better off than in the South.