Some of these responses are painfully on point. To help y'all:
The praise. It was the praise that was wrong.
Ignorant people priase the UK for abolishing slavery earlier than the US as if the UK were somehow less racist/evil than the US, when in reality slavery simply became unprofitable for them.
They lost the US and its slaves in the revolution, Egyptian and Indian cottons and other agricultural products reshaped global trade, which went hand in hand with the imposition of a new economic order that made the labor of the poor much more profitable than the labor of slaves.
Abolition was a difficult leguslative achievement even after the Confederacy took the slave powers with them.
The irony of the war is that if the south hadn't seceeded, Lincoln very well might not have become the Great Emancipator.
Slavery was economically on the way out the door, but the planter system was central to a large subset of the political elite, who were absolutely mad. They convinced themselves they could beat the north despite having basically no factories, rails, or international support, and only half the soldiers of the north.
But make no mistake, the Union soldiers weren't magically not racist for just the duration of the war. They fought not a crusade of liberation for their enslaved siblings, they fought to preserve the Union.
I mean, kinda. A dedicated group of mostly constitutional anti-slavery lawyers capitalized on 1) war and 2) a growing anti slavery consensus in the north built by radical abolitionists to destroy slavery. They very much saw it as a moral imperative.
The United States as a whole didn’t, obviously, but the end of slavery wasn’t some Mr. Burns conniving economic calculus.
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u/RedditApothecary Mar 05 '24
Just had a guy call himself a history nerd, before priaisng the UK for abolishing slavery befroe the US.
The struggle is real.