Northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial economic sponsors of slavery

Evidence

ON DECEMBER 24, 1860, South Carolina legislators alluded to the Declaration of Independence when stating their reasons for secession. Abolitionists were “inciting” contented captives to “servile insurrection,” and “elevating to citizenships” Blacks who constitutionally were “incapable of becoming citizens.” South Carolina’s secession from the United States did not just mean the loss of a state, and soon a region, but the loss of the region’s land and wealth. The South had millions of acres of land that were worth more in purely economic terms than the almost 4 million enslaved human beings who were toiling on its plantations in 1860. With their financial investments in the institution of slavery and their dependence on its productivity, northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial sponsors of slavery. And so, they pushed their congressmen onto their compromising knees to restore the Union. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 570

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the presumed North-South moral divide on slavery; northern capital supported the institution—useful for testing claims of a clean regional moral boundary.