Early in the nineteenth century, slaveholders began to view their slaves as property that needed protecting. Conditions improved slightly and slaves were given better food, clothing and housing. This was not done out of kindness, but because of a need to protect their property. Eventually laws were passed in southern states that limited the physical punishment that slaveholders could inflict upon slaves, and set the age at which slaves could be separated from their mothers.

Slavery needed to be protected from capitalism and democracy because these forces were inherently in opposition to slavery. Democracy declared all men equal before the law, but Paternalism provided the basis for a justification by saying these were not men, but some inferior being that needed to be ruled by whites. Slavery could develop and prosper in capitalistic America because the South was not a capitalistic society. It was a separate economy with very little wage labor.

Northerners - Anti-slavery but not Abolitionists

White northerners of all classes were opposed to slavery, but were overwhelmingly not abolitionists. Only about one percent of the white population would have called for an end to slavery by 1850. In the 1840s, the term anti-slavery came to mean opposition to expansion of slavery, but not abolition in states where it already existed.

White northern workers viewed slaves as a threat. How could they sell their services for wages when slaves worked for free? Equating them with slaves also diminished their social standing. White capitalists were opposed to slavery because they saw that the capital resources devoted...

Northerners of all classes wanted the western states to be Free because they needed the support of the west in expanding the power of the federal government, something that would not happen if the western states became Slave states.
Most northerners realized that the South would never give up slavery willingly. They knew that unless the South would accept an arrangement to pay for slaves (which would have been very costly), it would take armed conflict to remove slavery, and they were unwilling to resort to that. They just did not want to pay the costs necessary to end slavery. The North also had a vested interest in continuing slavery in the South. The cotton plantations provided ample amounts of cheap cotton for northern mills. Without slavery, this might not have been available, and northern industrialists would have had to look elsewhere for more costly alternatives. Northern wage earners also feared that the end of slavery in the South would mean a large influx of southern blacks to northern cities (which did eventually happen), providing competition for jobs and lowering wages. Farmers also were opposed to ending slavery. They did not want to compete with blacks for free land. So, while northerners did not want to see slavery expanded any further, they also did not want it to go away.