Belisarius7 wrote:New Englanders were no angels in the history of the US. New Englanders had been fighting natives since Plymouth, just as Virginians had since Jamestown. They fought their share of native wars in the Ohio Valley before and during the Creek and Seminole Wars. Many Union officers and soldiers from the American Civil War went on to serve out west in the Indian wars.
With regards to slavery, New England made and operated merchant ships that bore the Africans over from Africa to be slaves. Slavery was a national institution, though by the 1860s the South was the only section to find it profitable. Economic factors contributed most predominately to the banning of slavery in the North. This banning was not for the interest of black Americans, who at the time were not wanted by the American white population. The majority of white America, North and South, held natural racial prejudices for the time. While many did not like slavery, they very much did not want to free the slaves and then let them be equal to themselves. This is why you have Colonization societies in the US since independence. The problem was not just slavery, but racial tension that would play out nationally, in the rural South and urban Northern ghettos, for the next century.
The Mexican-American War was not purely, or even predominately, a Southern filibusterer attempt. It was part of a larger jingoistic American trend. Polk was just as willing to go to war with Great Britain over Oregon as he was Mexico for Texas ("Fifty-four forty or fight!), although ended up coming to an agreement with Britain (Oregon Treaty). The Mexican war was brought about by Democrats in the North and South. Southern interests in expanding slave states (thus keeping equilibrium in their eye) and Democrats in the North for Manifest Destiny, lucrative ports and railroads to them, as well as maintaining party cohesion.
As Lincoln so often stressed, the sins of the nation are the sins of the whole American people.
It's not that what you say is entirely untrue. It's almost always possible to argue for some degree of equivalence.
I know my ancestor, Cornelius Davis, was granted his plot of land in mid-state CT the late 1690s as a reward for his efforts in King Philip's War -- the war that exterminated most of the central/Southern New England tribes. His family kept the land through the '50s -- it recently got sold to a Swedish fellow -- but it the land was originally purchased in blood.
John Chivington was, of course, 'Union.' And the later, more systematic war against the Plains Indians was more 'clinical,' arguably less bloodthirsty, but still conducted as a war of extermination.
And, absolutely, I've been reading Life and Times of Frederick Douglass -- it's quite clear that the North had its share of race hatred.... though ironically, the 'inhospitality' he encountered in the skilled trades (as a caulker, etc.) was probably one of the things that pushed him onto the lecture circuit so quickly. (As far as I can tell, Douglass actually turned out to be quite a good investment for his owner -- sometime in the 1850s he bought his own freedom, finally, in British sterling, giving the b...d who owned him a fairly good rate of return.)
However... there's a reason Charles Sumner got brained on the floor of the Senate by Preston Brooks. There's a reason the Fugitive Slave acts of 1850 prompted such violent opposition in the North. There's a reason the Mexican-American War prompted such violent opposition in the North. There was even a reason that the State of Vermont seceded -- as a free state -- from the state of New York, then a slave state... and a reason why, by roughly 1856, it was making secessionist noises again.
Now, to be certain, there's also an economic reason why Vermont was depopulating to help settle Kansas (Cotton trumps wool). But the people it sent were die-hard republicans, and the resulting strife was fairly predictable.
And finally, the 'natural racial prejudices of the time' is a far over-simplified view. Leading up to the Civil War, slaves were one of the largest single categories of wealth in the United States. (As a matter of politics and political propaganda, think 'social security is the third rail of American politics' and amp up the voltage an order of magnitude.) It was also pretty much a no-brainer to imagine how the value of that 'asset class' might suddenly, and very sharply decline: if it were to become more common that the 'assets' walked off on their own. Ideologies of white supremacy were an essential element in maintaining the slave system, and it's fairly easy to pick out direct investments in building this ideology by 'the slave power' -- though, perhaps, Fitzhugh wrote Cannibals All just so as to avoid lazin' around all day.
One of the remarkable things about Frederick Douglass' career was the amount of time he spent in exile in Ireland and in the U.K., and his shock to face so little 'natural racial prejudice' while abroad. This is of particular interest given the particularlyinflammable ethnic relations between Irish immigrants and free blacks in the cities of the North: clearly there were social factors at work beyond natural prejudice.
That all said, a great many white northern soldiers paid in blood for their prejudices, natural or reinforced.