Anti-slavery vs Anti Racism

I was traveling through New York a few weeks ago and felt compelled to see the immigration museum on Ellis Island, and get a better understanding of what the New World looked like in the eyes of people creating a fresh life in America. They brought up the experience of slaves coming to the new world, but this isn’t what really stood out to me. What was truly striking to me was the experience freed slaves had in the post Civil war period in the North.

 We are constantly reminded time and time again that the Union was a group of states that fought for freedom for all people, not just whites. The history books offer that the north was adamantly opposed to slavery not just in their own states but in America as a whole. This may be true, but anti slavery was simply not the entire story for the North. Anti-slavery did not imply anti racism as I was to soon find out by reading one of the writings of a Kentucky farmer. This man had lived in a free state for an extended period of time, yet he was quite resentful of the slaves, and felt they were truly lazy people. Not only did he believe they were lazy but that they were “unfit for society, they would destroy the dignity of white labor”. This seems like a contradiction at first but then you begin to understand how northerners who were willing to fight for black’s freedom, would still treat them with little respect. The north saw the financial incentive. Even though there were a significant amount of people who wanted slavery to end because it was immoral, there was an even larger group who gained financially from the freedom of slaves. This farmer here did not want slaves to gain their freedom and then simply do whatever ever they wanted. He wanted them to work for him for a wage rather than under the rule of a slave owner for free. This farmer still felt very strongly that blacks were inferior that they served no greater purpose but to toil away due to their inability to live in a sophisticated way as white people could.

            It thus made much more sense to me why the integration and assimilation process has taken so much longer than would have expected. Most northerners were not looking for equality for the slaves but rather just an end to free and oppressive labor. They saw an opportunity to even out the economic playing field and for some northerners it just so happened that it worked out in the slave’s favor. Proving once again the story of freedom and prosperity in American was not as smooth and morally righteous as one might believe. (461 words)

Below is the quotes of the farmer

Farmers commentary on Blacks

" The negroes must be taught that their freedom has but resulted as an incident of the war and that it is not their privilege to skulk off to comfortable corners in the North, where they can curl up in the chimneys and lazy way of life of useless indolence. The people of the North are beginning to feel a powerful desire to swap off the useless black refugees among them for their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons now languishing under poisonous miasmas which a negro may breath with impunity"

"We oppose all schemes... to fill our schools and domestic circle with the African race.. Unaccustomed to our climate, unskilled in our mode of agri culture, undisciplined in habits, and unfit for society, they would destroy the dignity of white labor"