Get real. The north had slaves too. They just freed them 3 years before the south did.
There's no denying that. And not all were freed ahead of the Southern states; slaves in Kentucky and the few remaining in Delaware had to wait for the 13th Amendment. But the Northern states did not launch a protracted and bloody rebellion to protect their institution of slavery. It was the South that did that.
“Get real. The north had slaves too. They just freed them 3 years before the south did.”
General Grant freed his personal slave of four years ONE year before the war. Had to. He was moving to IL and couldn’t bring him with him. Sad day for him to, he loved renting the slave out for three dollars a day. Kept him in whiskey. He didn’t really need him though; there were 30 at his disposal on his wife’s plantation where he lived.
A lot of the others out of the 30 they kept at White Haven, the family plantation he oversaw, walked off, but were not set free until years after Robert E. Lee freed his:
Robert E. Lee vigorously opposed slavery and as early as 1856 made this statement:
“There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.”
Lee also knew that the use of slaves was coming to an end. Cyrus McCormick’s 1831 invention of the mule-drawn mechanical reaper sounded the death knell for the use of slave labor. Before the Civil War began, 250,000 slaves had already been freed.
Robert E. Lee did not own slaves, but Union generals did.
When his father-in-law died, Lee took over the management of the plantation his wife had inherited and immediately began freeing the slaves. By the time Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, every slave in Lee’s charge had been freed.
Kind of ironic. Lee freed his family’s slaves before old General Grant’s family got around to letting his go.