Other Northerners reported similar experiences, including 22-year-old Abraham Lincoln in his 1831 trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
What they saw, in addition to slavery's cruelty, was that the more slavery dominated an area, the poorer it seemed -- to them.
In fact, most simply didn't understand the economics of what they were looking at.
Southern wealth was almost entirely tied up in its two biggest investments: land and slaves, and since land was quickly worn out growing intensive cash crops, there was a constant need to move on to newer frontiers, meaning the Southern landscape looked more "rough and ready" than more settled commercial ports of New England.
So the correct comparison should have been not frontier South vs settled Northeast, but rather Southern frontier vs Western frontier.
In that comparison, Southerners lived relatively more comfortably than their northern-western cousins.
But regardless of such early negative reports from Northerners, North and South got along well enough to defeat the British and write a new Constitution in 1787.
It's whole idea was to protect rights of individual states, while providing just enough Federal Government to insure a common defense and other minimum national necessities.
Point is: that North and South were different from the earliest days is not even debatable -- of course they were different.
But they were close enough to win the Revolution, establish a Constitution and survive as a nation for many decades.
What finally ended it in 1860 was fears by Deep South Fire Eaters, that Northern abolitionists would attack and destroy the "peculiar institution" on which their lives depended.
But abolitionism did not begin with Congregationalists ministers in the mid-1600s.
Abolitionism began centuries earlier, with the first English laws (i.e., 1102) and Papal Encyclicals (i.e., 1435) outlawing slavery in parts of Europe and the Americas.
So, abolitionism arrived in America before the first slaves did.
They were absolutely correct. I'm convinced Lincoln and his inner circle of Illinois and Massachusetts pols, and certain New York businessmen like J.M. Forbes and Lewis Tappan (whose names, still famous today, prove their establishmentarian impulses and dynastic ambitions), came to office with a secret war policy, which was presented back-to-front as opposition to the extension of slavery, but was instead a determination to destroy the moneyed classes of the South economically and politically .... and, as it turned out, physically as well. Which worked for the Lincoln party. (Nothing wrong with being flexible! -- </s>)
That is the point. The Republican Party's real platform was to attack and totally destroy the South, take the Government into receivership, and seize control, total control, of the country's fortunes, turning the federal republic of enumerated powers into an autocratic, centralized and illimitable one: Hamilton's old ideal of "Empire without the King".
Or do you think it all happened by accident, as a series of extemporaneous responses to unforeseen events: that the Republic "lurched uncontrollably" </off John McLaughlin> into a centralized nation-state run by a delimited "Who's Who" of elite politicians and businessmen, into whose phalanx-like Gilded-Age ranks nobody managed to break until Grover Cleveland won the White House?
But abolitionism did not begin with Congregationalists ministers in the mid-1600s.
It wasn't about abolition. It was about what Yankees thought about Southerners, which they demonstrated beyond recall -- "there are certain things that, once they are said, nothing else need be said" (said my old boss in 1973) -- when John Brown was executed in 1859, and Massachusetts Gov. Nathaniel Banks responded by standing up six regiments, fully armed and equipped for the field, ready to go to Virginia to put down the South.
Abolitionism began centuries earlier..... So, abolitionism arrived in America before the first slaves did.
Not really. It was never a political issue before Northern apologists for the Tariff of Abominations (1828) started reaching around for clubs with which to beat the South and divide the West from the South, the better to isolate the South and subdue it, and chain its economy to Henry Clay's American System and its Yankeephile taxes, tariffs, and capital-infrastructure subsidies.