Northern Opinion Against Abolition

The notion that the War Between the States was prosecuted by the North for slavery abolition is a long-standing myth; the Northern war aim from the beginning was to prevent the political independence of the Southern States and force them into a revolutionary and consolidated union with the North.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
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Northern Opinion Against Abolition:

“As late as 1854, the South divided on the Homestead Act along east-west and party lines...almost as markedly as the North. Again and again the South seems not to have been united on any economic policies, even those connected with slavery, but only on the issue of slavery qua slavery; it was the sectional crisis over slavery that conveyed regional unity into economic legislation and other issues.

Having found these actual economic conflicts insubstantial, many writers…conclude that it must have been the apprehension of future policies on economics and slavery that led the South to secede. This argument is hard to refute, but it is rendered suspect by the fact that it often seems to be reached by precisely this process of elimination. It is true enough that the Republican platform of 1860 contained an economic program not altogether to Southern liking; but none of these proposals were new, and it was, after all, the South’s bolting of the Democratic party in 1860 that made Lincoln’s election inevitable.

One can finds statements reflection all sorts of apprehensions and fears, but there is also an abundance of contradictory testimony, and unless it can be shown that those fears manifested themselves into actual behavior or pressures or incentives, or in some way reflected a perception of real trends, the argument is unconvincing.

This leaves till last the most straightforward motive, involving both economics and slavery: the north wanted to abolish slavery, and the slaveowners of the South wanted to retain their valuable property. The trouble is, while the latter is surely true, the former is not. It is not just that one is hard put to find Northerners with an economic interest in abolishing slavery. Northern opinion and dominant political groups simply did not advocate such measures. [Author Lee] Benson goes so far to assert:

“Had Northerners held a referendum in November, 1860, solely on a proposition requiring the Federal government to require the Southern State governments to abolish slavery by some form of legislative action, probably no more than 2 per cent, almost certainly no more than 5 per cent, of the Northern electorate would have voted “Aye.”

The issue of abolition is of course different from the question of the extension of slavery into the territories, on which free farmers and miners had an economic interest buttressed by racial prejudice. [This] allowed Republican leaders to base a free-soil doctrine on moral hostility to slavery, while at the same time explaining to their abolitionist constituency why they advocated no action whatsoever against slavery itself.

Thus as immigrants increasingly took the places of native-born workers during the 1840s and 1850s, a community of economic interest began to emerge…The 1860 platform of the Republican party, and its slogans (“Vote yourself a farm,” “Vote yourself a tariff”) seem a perfect embodiment of the idea.

(The Political Economy of the Cotton South, Gavin Wright, W.W. Norton, 1978, pp. 135-137)

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Northern Opinion Against Abolition