[quote]RyuuKyuzo wrote:
No, he just wanted to get the blacks out of the country.
That’s really the only reason why the north didn’t have slaves too; not because of some moral issue with slavery, but because they didn’t want to live around blacks. [/quote]
You’re conflating two related issues into one.
The vast majority of abolitionists hated slavery for moral reasons. They found the concept of slavery itself abhorrent.
Many others didn’t like slavery because it conflicted with the entire concept of labor that was being designed in the North as well, like Varqanir stated.
But they also didn’t like blacks and either didn’t think much on what would happen AFTER they got freed, or thought that the blacks wouldn’t mind getting on a boat and going to Africa.
So what lots of people right now don’t get is that both North and South didn’t like black people. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of the population considered them subhuman, or at least lesser in some manner, and virtually everyone except a rare few believed that blacks and whites could never coexist. Lincoln thought the same, his reasoning being that the grand issue of slavery and the existing wounds between the two races would never allow them to exist peacefully with one another.
But it is a “stretch”, to say the least, to say that abolitionists opposed slavery because they just wanted black people out of the country.