Effect on Northern Labor.

This reasoning also proves the notion false, that emancipation at the South will lower the price of labour at the North. For, instead of sending up the southern blacks to compete with the working classes here, it would both keep them at home and draw back many who were driven hither by slavery, but would gladly return when they could do so and be free. Besides, it would much enlarge the market at the South, for the fruits of northern industry and enterprise. The southern laborers, when free and paid, would buy of us many comforts and conveniences not allowed them now;—cloths, hats, shoes, furniture, household utensils, improved working-tools, a countless variety of northern manufactures, and of foreign wares, imported through the North;—the demand for which would give new activity to our shops and mills and shipping, and steadier employment, and, most likely, higher wages, to all kinds of labor here. Three million new consumers of the wares we make and sell, would add greatly to the income of the North. New shops and factories, built to meet their wants, would grow to villages and towns; and, employing many busy hands in every useful calling, create home markets for the farmers’ produce; increase the worth of lands and houses; put life into every branch of business; and spread the benefits of the change among all classes over the whole country. Slavery keeps from us all these benefits, and thus, in robbing southern labor, robs also northern. Yet worse; it degrades labor; coupling it, at the South, with the lowest social debasement, and thereby lessening its respectability at the North, till now it has become, in the esteem of many, a positive disgrace, and the honest sons of toil are shut out of self-styled “good society,” by reason solely of their useful occupations. Hence, doubtless, is it that our hopeful youth so often flee from field or shop, into some over-crowded “profession,” and suffer in proud poverty through life, or are corrupted and depraved by the manifold temptations of their unwisely chosen lot. Hence, too, the laborer, failing of the respect which is his due from others, too often loses somewhat of his self-respect, grows careless of his character and conduct, makes little or no earnest effort to increase in worth and rise in social standing, and perhaps becomes at length, in many instances, as low as he is rated. Thus the enslavement of labor at the South, is by no means least among the causes which keep down labor at the North, and, of course, emancipation there would be no detriment, but a great advantage, to the working classes here.