re: #55 wheat-dogg

The North understandably did not want the 3/5ths rule to be extended into the new territories and states, because it had already given the slaveholding states more representation in the House than they would have gotten otherwise. Allowing the new areas to be slaveholding states would have meant slavery would be a near-permanent fixture in the USA — or at least a longer lasting fixture.

More to the point, northern factory workers and miners and farmhands knew they couldn’t get jobs to earn a decent living in any place where slaves would be doing that kind of work; and factory owners and mill owners and so on knew they couldn’t compete with companies that didn’t have to pay for labor.