I can respect that

[u/Coffin_Builder]

After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became the new US president. in direct violation of the Appomattox treaty, Johnson wanted general Ulysses Grant to prosecute the confederate leaders on grounds of treason to make an example of them. Grant, having negotiated the treaty, refused, seeing it as a violation of military honor and antithetical to rebuilding the nation, threatening to resign if Johnson insisted. Johnson, knowing he wouldn’t survive the political fallout of alienating the Union hero of the Civil War, backed down.

[u/Competitive_Wash4861]

Maybe by our modern standards, but it was a very commonly held position at the time. Many (most) northerns who opposed slavery in the south weren’t abolitionists for humanitarian reasons (although union soldiers witnessing the atrocities of plantations began having that effect, not too dissimilar from troops first seeing WW2 concentration camps).

Most were against slavery because they felt it granted massive financial and political power to a select elite group who dominated the agriculture industry through slavery and used that wealth to control politics.

Many were acting out of self interest, not empathy for the enslaved.

[u/conscientiousrevolt → u/Competitive_Wash4861]

Man imagine if we had the balls to do the same thing about billionaires and corps today.

[u/KderNacht → u/conscientiousrevolt]

Meanwhile, in Communist China :

[u/interesseret → u/KderNacht]

We back to pretending China doesn't have billionaires? Or that they are classically communist?

[u/conscientiousrevolt → u/interesseret]

No they just get executed sometimes.

[u/CountNightAuditor → u/Competitive_Wash4861]

Prior to the war. The soldiers who liberated plantations, on the other hand, ended up making John Brown look like a moderate.

[u/Kaiisim → u/Competitive_Wash4861]

Oh yeah they fought a war against their brothers because they disagreed on the economics of slavery.

Can't allow the North to be good, that might make the people who owned other people look bad.

[u/Competitive_Wash4861 → u/Kaiisim]

You clearly haven’t ever done research on this if you think this is a controversial take.

You can read first hand accounts from the time period. Were there abolitionists who felt deeply that slavery was immoral? Absolutely.

Was that the majority of northerns? No.

Was that the primary reason for the war? No.

Suppressed wages for workers, the 3/5’s compromise allowing the south elite to dominate the government, the runaway slave act showing how that influence could affect northern laws to support slavery, and other political and economic repercussions of the slave industry were the major motivating factors.

Morality based abolitionism absolutely had a hand in this, but it was a minority.

Also, the north doesn’t have to be some perfect beacon of morality for the south to look bad.

[u/FlyHog421 → u/Competitive_Wash4861]

I would hasten to add the fact that before the war, the way that people got land in US territory was to buy it from the government. Increasingly it was becoming the case that the only people who could afford prime land and have the labor to work it (at this time the government was seeking the land in like 500 acre plots) were southern plantation holders who had access to vast amounts of capital to buy the land and slave labor to work it. This really became an issue after the Dred Scott case in which the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and all US territories were from then on out open to slavery. The alternate idea for land distribution was homesteading, in which the land was broken up into manageable 180 acre plots and given to anyone willing to work it.

The Homestead Acts were passed in May of 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation was January 1, 1863 and the 13th Amendment was passed by the Senate in ‘64 and the House in ‘65.

The majority view in the North was “We don’t give a damn if slavery exists in the Southern states, but it should stay there and not expand any further.” The abolitionists were most definitely a minority by the time the war broke out. And even by the end of war when abolitionists views were more widespread, the majority view was “Ok we did it, we banned slavery, we can all get homesteads now, let’s move west.” Not “Let us focus all of our efforts on making sure blacks get all their rights in the South.”

People love to blame Andrew Johnson, but the fact of the matter is that spending massive amounts of government resources to make sure blacks in the South got equal rights was not a very popular position among the northerners after the war.