so did a major Boston,MA bank.
while chattal slavery was a HIDEIOUS EVIL,the damnyankees hands are anything but clean when it comes to having funded the slave trade, owning ALL the US-registry slave ships AND actually owning THOUSANDS of slaves themselves, until well after Richmond fell in 1865.
Well, that was a stupid and completely unnecessary thing to do. The debate here isn't whether slavery was evil. We can't judge nineteenth century slavery by our own standards because we've had fifteen decades to refine our concepts on the subject. At the time in question opinion was very divided on the subject, not least because slavery as an institution had existed from the dawn of human experience, and most of the people engaged in the question had been born into a society where it had been taken for granted. The debate is whether the Southern states' need to expand the institution (not abolish it; for that wasn't the issue) trumped every other consideration. It did, and that's what initiated the conflict.
Today we see a similar situation in the abortion debate. There are many right-minded people who don't want to see abortion eliminated, but who want to see it contained by limiting its expansion toward such areas as partial-birth and other third-trimester procedures. Opposed to them are those who believe that any imposition on abortion would be a wedge that would ultimately lead to its abolition, and so they adamantly refuse to countenance any restrictions whatever on the procedure. If we could get those two factions lined up in separate geographical areas the resultant political situation would be similar to that existing prior to the civil war.