So? What does that have to do with anything I was saying? Due to their better ports with rivers that stretched farther into the country, magic money machines in New York, and very importantly receiving oodles of tax money from states with the economic boon of stolen labour, the Northern states generally did not need to rely on human trafficking for internal revenue the same way Southern states needed to (again, if they did not want to fall into economic subservience, WHICH WAS THE WHOLE REASON WHY THEY REVOLTED IN THE FIRST PLACE).
Of course, human trafficking was legal in most of the country, and people all across the country actively engaged with it as well as passively benefitted from it, and people all across the country tried to fight against it.
But one region needed the economic might human trafficking provides, while the other region could muddle along without it, especially if they were able to make the other region economically subservient to them... And of course this is made even easier when you coincidentally decide to change a hundred years of policy and start foreign adventurism, knocking over South American countries for so fruit companies can have record profits.
I was trying to be careful to not put moral consideration onto one region over the other, and very intentionally didn't say "The North" when I said "more freedom-minded folks", because those folks were found all over the country, sometimes even people who were actively owning humans as objects - humans are complicated. All of the country was complicit in human trafficking, but one side was more economically beholden to it, and this weak spot allowed the other side to put them over a barrel and have their way with them, as I alluded to.
My brother in Christ, go back and reread what I said with your trigger filters off. Framers in the North were generally less interested in making a mandate on human trafficking either way, since they had the ports and the banks. There were a couple pro-freedom radicals amongst them of course, but I was very careful not to ascribe that moral boon to any region, since it was a wide-spread notion with few proclaimers of real political power.
The states who relied on magic math for their economic power did not care as much if one of their main goods was made illegal, since they could pick up the slack elsewhere in their vast portfolio of tradable goods. No free stolen labour would sting, but you always had the old standby of cheap immigrant labour that you could exploit by underpaying them, and plenty of it. Meanwhile, for the Southern framers, not just their economy and their right to self-determination that they fought and died for, but their entire way of life was at stake if they lost the right to own humans as objects. The South was understandably very nervous about codifying freedoms that could eventually be used to legislatively bully them into existential change, and when that failed, used as a moral bullwhip to unleash the hounds upon them. Which, you know, did end up happening. Hence, all the sweet-talking and reassurances that were needed. The banking systems that ultimately led us to 2008 were a product of the North, and the South generally did not trust them, preferring the reality of the physical goods they produced right there on American soil. Many didn't even see the need for a Constitution or a federal government, and would have preferred to just be a loose coalition (or confederation?) of states with standing agreements to back each other up if the British came back or the Canucks got frisky. It's not a moral assertion, it's just history that the Constitution's road to ratification was rocky and fraught, and the framers of the South generally needed to be worked upon to get on board with saddling themselves with a federal government ostensibly made of all but actually run out of frickin New York. And we know what those New Yorkers are like.
So? What does that have to do with anything I was saying? Due to their better ports with rivers that stretched farther into the country, magic money machines in New York, and very importantly receiving oodles of tax money from states with the economic boon of stolen labour, the Northern states generally did not need to rely on human trafficking for internal revenue the same way Southern states needed to (again, if they did not want to fall into economic subservience, WHICH WAS THE WHOLE REASON WHY THEY REVOLTED IN THE FIRST PLACE). Of course, human trafficking was legal in most of the country, and people all across the country actively engaged with it as well as passively benefitted from it, and people all across the country tried to fight against it.
But one region needed the economic might human trafficking provides, while the other region could muddle along without it, especially if they were able to make the other region economically subservient to them... And of course this is made even easier when you coincidentally decide to change a hundred years of policy and start foreign adventurism, knocking over South American countries for so fruit companies can have record profits.
I was trying to be careful to not put moral consideration onto one region over the other, and very intentionally didn't say "The North" when I said "more freedom-minded folks", because those folks were found all over the country, sometimes even people who were actively owning humans as objects - humans are complicated. All of the country was complicit in human trafficking, but one side was more economically beholden to it, and this weak spot allowed the other side to put them over a barrel and have their way with them, as I alluded to.
My brother in Christ, go back and reread what I said with your trigger filters off. Framers in the North were generally less interested in making a mandate on human trafficking either way, since they had the ports and the banks. There were a couple pro-freedom radicals amongst them of course, but I was very careful not to ascribe that moral boon to any region, since it was a wide-spread notion with few proclaimers of real political power.
The states who relied on magic math for their economic power did not care as much if one of their main goods was made illegal, since they could pick up the slack elsewhere in their vast portfolio of tradable goods. No free stolen labour would sting, but you always had the old standby of cheap immigrant labour that you could exploit by underpaying them, and plenty of it. Meanwhile, for the Southern framers, not just their economy and their right to self-determination that they fought and died for, but their entire way of life was at stake if they lost the right to own humans as objects. The South was understandably very nervous about codifying freedoms that could eventually be used to legislatively bully them into existential change, and when that failed, used as a moral bullwhip to unleash the hounds upon them. Which, you know, did end up happening. Hence, all the sweet-talking and reassurances that were needed. The banking systems that ultimately led us to 2008 were a product of the North, and the South generally did not trust them, preferring the reality of the physical goods they produced right there on American soil. Many didn't even see the need for a Constitution or a federal government, and would have preferred to just be a loose coalition (or confederation?) of states with standing agreements to back each other up if the British came back or the Canucks got frisky. It's not a moral assertion, it's just history that the Constitution's road to ratification was rocky and fraught, and the framers of the South generally needed to be worked upon to get on board with saddling themselves with a federal government ostensibly made of all but actually run out of frickin New York. And we know what those New Yorkers are like.