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You will find it interesting to google New England textile mills and learn about child labor in those mills.

For example, “

The system of child labor in Rhode Island mills began with Rhode Island’s first textile mill - the Slater Mill. Samuel Slater’s first employees were all children from seven to twelve years of age. By 1830, 55% of the mill workers in Rhode Island were children. These children worked long hours in unhealthy factories for wages less than $1 per week.”

The owners of the New England textile mills needed the southern cotton. They didn’t care about slaves. They had their own slaves in their factories.

It was a different time with different values.

You're right. My great grandfather was born in Michigan in 1855 and was working before his teens. The north has no moral high ground over the south on any of it. Although blacks were free'd in the north they were forced into segregation {a practice that was even in place in WW2} and given the worst of the jobs for minimal wages. In the south you were as likely to see blacks as whites working in fields poor was poor and my dad grew up in The Great Depression on the wrong side of the tracks. Skin color meant nothing there and that was in a southeastern city.

Slavery as such existed from Alabama up into NY State in coal states both in the north and the south. You were paid less wages than what the company which owned everything in town including your home and all the stores charged you to live. The song Sixteen Tons was reality. Automation and technology changed that just as it changed the Pre Civil War north. Strip mining and machinery made deep mining requiring more men less profitable. Ike's highway projects connected isolated areas to cities so workers could go to larger towns. People forget.

ladyjane: "You will find it interesting to google New England textile mills and learn about child labor in those mills."

Which leads to the logical question: what was worse, Southern slavery or Northern "wage slavery"?
Well, seems to me we should be able to find some data to answer the following questions:

By 1860, of the four million Southern slaves, how many tried to escape to freedom in the North each year?
Was it not at least thousands?
Of the half million freed-blacks in 1860, how many voluntarily returned to slavery?
Was that number not zero?
Of the millions of Northern "wage slaves", many of them immigrants, how many found conditions so bad they returned to their "old country"?
The answer here is, yes, some did, maybe 10%, maybe 20%, but the vast majority worked as hard as they could until they had improved their standard of living enough to move on to a better life, sometimes even farming or ranching.
Of the millions of Northern "wage slaves", including blacks how many voluntarily gave up "wage slavery" for real Southern slavery?
Is that answer not also zero?

Finally we should note that often children working in factories came from large families who depended for their standard of living on wages from their working children.
As the family's living standard improved, children could be withdrawn from factory work and sent, for example, to schools.
Point is: the decision to force children into "wage slavery" came not from the factory owners, but rather from the families who felt the need for extra income.

Bottom line here is that from our earliest days, Americans have always enjoyed a higher standard of living which made us the envy of the world, and drew immigrants from many poorer countries -- immigrants who started off on the bottom rung, but slowly worked their ways up the ladder of success, each generation building on the achievements of those going before.

So, yes, "wage slavery" was a tough row to hoe, but it was voluntary (for the families), often temporary and totally unrelated to race, unlike permanent Southern black slavery.