Slavery True Picture of the Relationship Between

¶ … Slavery [...] true picture of the relationship between slavery and Americans of both regions, including the impact of racism on the thinking of all white Americans of this era. While slavery was dominant in the South, and less dominant in the North and West, slavery was not entirely a regional issue. Beliefs and ideals differed in the North and South, and not all residents of either area exhibited only one view of slavery.

While it is common to believe that the South and all southerners supported slavery, and the North and all northerners were abolitionists, this is not the case. Throughout the North, there were many slave owners, and throughout the South, there were many people who did not believe in slavery. In addition, it is clear from the racial inequities that continued after the Civil War, that there was an overwhelming belief in the country that blacks, free or not, were inferior to whites. The South continued to persecute blacks, and the North continued to allow it to happen until 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was finally passed, nearly 100 years after the end of the Civil War. Many northerners may have disliked slavery, but that did not stop them from doing profitable business with southern slave owners, and even keeping slaves in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. One historian notes, "Initially in Washington, slavery and the slave trade likewise flourished out of the public eye" (Davis). However, it did flourish right up until the Civil War began. It seems incongruous that slavery existed in the capital of the nation that ended up broken in two over the issue, but this illustrates that slavery was not just a southern issue, slaves were held in the North, too. In fact, many slaves lived and worked in northern towns such as New York and Boston in the 18th century. For example, the black American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, was a slave in Boston who eventually gained her freedom. In the earliest days of slavery, both North and South held slaves, and slavery was abolished in the North, but it was still a volatile issue.

Northern and southern Democrats advocated slavery. In fact, many of them simply ignored slavery in the South, and tried to see both sides of the slavery issue. Historian Davis continues, "Until the outbreak of war, they attempted to forge a middle path, representing slavery as benign so long as adequate restraints were in place to prevent individual cases of abuse" (Davis). In addition, many other people lived in the South besides native southerners, and many of these people did not hold slaves, or agree with slaveholding. Another historian notes, "A close examination of diaries, letter collections, and memoirs written by both native and adoptive southerners of the period indicates that those born and reared outside the South were, in fact, likelier to harbor antislavery feelings" (Rousey). Thus, newcomers to the South were not necessarily slaveholders, and so, the entire southern population did not support and condone slavery.

However, simply because a majority of transplants in the South did not support slavery, there were many other northerners who did not have a problem with the "peculiar institution." Historian Rousey notes abolitionist John S.C. Abbott toured the South, "he encountered a northerner in New Orleans who assured Abbott that 'I was always in favor of slavery when in the North, and I am still more so now that I have come South. The slaves are much better off than the laboring class at the North'" (Rousey). Thus, slavery was not a simple black and white, North and South issue. It was a highly personal issue that crossed lines and created misunderstanding and hatred on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners felt quite vindicated in their use of slaves, pointing to the rest of the world as an example of slavery and bondage. Historian Riccards writes, "A good part of the world at that time permitted slavery. It was the North that dramatically changed from 1790 to 1840. It was the North that began to see that slavery was not just a system of alternative labor, but a terrible moral dilemma" (Riccards 3). However, many in the North recognized that their profits were directly connected to southern plantation slaveholders. For example, the textile mills of the North depended on southern cotton, and so, textile mill owners had close relationships with southern businessmen, and looked the other way when the issue of slavery came up. The cotton plantations depended on slave labor to make the labor intensive crop profitable, and the northern businessmen relied on the crop to create textiles for a growing world market.

In addition, slavery was largely (although not all) a rural occupation. Most slaves worked on large, rural plantations, rather than in the cities of the South. The South was still a largely agricultural society, while the North was rapidly becoming more industrialized and more urban. Historian Riccards continues, "by 1840, 1 out of 3 people in New England and the Atlantic states lived in cities and towns. The opposite held true below the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, from 1810 to 1860 the percentage of capital involved in manufacturing in the South declined from 31% to 16%. Agriculture remained king" (Riccards 3). Thus, slavery made more economic sense in the South, and so it predominated there.