Harriet Tubman rescued slaves from the deep south and brought them to the free north… right?
It’s a subtle bit of US propaganda that that’s the impression American schoolchildren are given.
In actuality, in the prewar years, Tubman operated entirely within what later became the “northern side” in the Civil War—because the “free north” actually had several slave states of its own.
And the destination of many slaves wasn’t actually the free states at all. That’s the other bit of propaganda.
See, because the south was opposed to state’s rights (contrary to what they later claimed), southern legislators passed federal laws that required northern authorities to cooperate in hunting down and returning enslaved people to their owners.
So the only “really” safe place to go was Canada, especially to St. Catharines (right by Niagara Falls). Even Tubman herself lived in Canada for awhile.
Tubman was a badass and a hero, and I have nothing negative to say about her. My point is that the true story is that Tubman rescued slaves from the North and brought many of them to Canada, not that she rescued slaves from the backwards South and brought them to the enlightened North. Her story doesn’t reflect well on the northern US at all; her story is actually an illustration of how complicit the northern US was in protecting slavery.
The more you look at the history from antebellum north to civil war to ‘reconstruction’ the more you realize how little the north really gave a shit about rights and freedom of slaves and black Americans. The north as a liberator is something it kind of fell into ass backwards and is greatly played up in retrospect but they definitely weren’t doing it on moral grounds.
The north was largely racist they just had their economic eggs in different baskets than the south and kind of thought the superior white man would just out-compete black Americans out of existence
Northern elites didn't think they'd outcompete slavery, they were dependent on it. If you've got a factory that processes cotton, you're not competing with slavery.
Meanwhile abolitionism was becoming increasingly popular among the working class, all the way up to the civil war. Even more people became abolitionists once the war meant seeing what slavery actually looked like.
Depends on who specifically Were talking about. There are quotes from people like Lincoln’s vp, talking about how black people won’t be able to compete with whites and basically how they’d fade out bc of completion whether returning to Africa or who knows what grim shit he thought.
Part of the industrialist industries in the north meant they weren’t reliant on slavery in that way and there was plenty of push to give those jobs to white people over blacks which is a whole other struggle people of color had to deal with even up there
My point is I wouldn’t paint the north as overwhelming concerned about being liberators, there was a wide range of stances on it. Surely there were people there who felt that way but I think there is a huge anti historical effort to play up how many were that is largely revisionist