That is one of the saddest things to me. That more Americans weren’t “foaming at the mouth abolitionists”. I know we’re not suppose to judge people by today’s standards, but there were people with the moral clarity to see that slavery was wrong. Why wasn’t it more! It should have been 90% of Americans!
In fact the south took the opposite path. They went from the founding fathers generation of slave owners who knew slavery was wrong and incompatible with “all men are created equal”. Who may not have had the courage to say it in public but many did express it privately in their letters. To the 1840s and after slave owners (and even none slave owning southerners) who proclaimed slavery a positive good.
The issue isn’t whether people thought slavery was wrong - the consensus seems to be that in the non-slave states, the majority of people disliked the institution in the abstract. That doesn’t mean that they were willing to see the nation torn apart and have hundreds of thousands of their countrymen die in order to end slavery.
Exactly right, and that is the heart of the great bait-and-switch of Southern slaveholders from 1787 to roughly 1840.
Being Democrats of course they didn't admit to changing, instead they blamed Northerners for suddenly becoming hostile to slavery.
But it wasn't Northerners who changed, they were hostile in 1787 and still hostile in 1840.
It was Southern slaveholders who went from agreeing that slavery should be abolished, gradually, to open hostility to any such suggestions.
Northerners were conflicted on the subject of Southern slavery -- Northern Democrats remained Doughfaced & loyal to their Southern allies while Northern abolitionists slowly gained enough political support to form their own party, Republicans.
Republicans were the first party in our history to openly oppose slavery and the results were immediate & dramatic threats of secession by Southern slaveholders.