How is the North responsible for slavery?

Answer 1

The North was very responsible for slavery.

If you want to go in depth, read the book "Complicity" that was written by reporters for the Hartford Courant.

I don't know how deep you want to go.

Consider a few things

1) The North had both full and gradual emancipation

2) 1st Industrial Revolution in the US centered on textiles--cloth

3) Slaves' clothing and farming tools

3) North and international trade of American goods

4) Northern banks and Southern planters' relationship

5) Northern insurance companies' relationship with Southern plantation owners

Answer 2

The North bears responsibility for slavery in three ways. First, Northerners still owned slaves in the early days fo the Republic, although the practice was became more rare as the region moved to an industrial economy. Secondly, by compromising with slaveholding states during the formation of the Constitution, the Northern states enshrined slaveholders' constitutional rights as property owners, and allowed them to count their slaves, who had no legal rights themselves, to be counted toward representation in Congress. Lastly, by allowing states to enter the Union as slave states after ratification, Northerners strengthened the South's political power up through the 1850s.

Answer 3

Perhaps saying the North is "responsible" for slavery might be a slight overstatement. However, it certainly relied on southern slavery to help drive its evolving, industrialized economy. Just as plantation owners in the South used slave labor to, for instance, pick cotton from day to night, much of that cotton was sold and transported to the industrialized North, which often applied it to its rapidly growing textile industry. Hence, there was an economic relationship between the North and South. Cotton was not an easily accessible commodity for northerns to collect on their own. Therefore, they paid southern plantation owners for cotton (which was more accessible in the region), thereby contributing to the perpetuation of the slave system -- both the southern plantation owner earned his money off the backs of slaves and northern owned money by turning cotton into textile commodities.