I made this TikTok about Thomas Nast cartoons about white immigrant opposition to Chinese immigration, and part of it discussed the Draft Riots, which were part of the composition in a cartoon.
user6041026417578 wrote:
I made a long video, but it was boring and I wasn’t certain my interpretation was correct, so I am going to write a response here instead.
I didn’t mean to give the impression that the cause of the Civil War was not slavery. It was, but it wasn’t because the North was eager to free enslaved Black people. It was because the Planters in the South wanted to retain slavery and expand the slave republic.
The Irish immigrants were diverse in opinion, but clearly, one line of thought was to blame Black people, rather than the white industrialists who had power in the North, or the Planters who had power in the South. They could hold multiple ideas, and one was anti-Black, and pro-white, because Irish immigrants were legally classified as white, and wanted to be socially included in whiteness, as well.
Also, a side note: the 3/5 compromise was not what the commenter thinks. This is a common error. It was a concession to the Planters, to increase their representation in the Congress, in order to get them to join the US.
This above comment, on the whole, was terrible.
More detail about what I said
Abolitionism
DuBois says the abolitionist movement was small, and didn’t have much sympathy until the Civil War fortunes for the North improved, because enslaved people fled their farms, ran to the Union army, and effectively had a “general strike” against the Planters. This self-liberatory action changed Northern white perceptions of enslaved Black people, and made them take up the Abolitionists’ moral arguments.
To get an idea of the abolitionist factions in the North, read these Wikipedia pages:
The Liberty Party – an Abolitionist 3rd party, very much a moralist party, that won few seats.
The Free Soil Party – a merger of the Free Soil movement and the Liberty Party, anti-slavery Northern Democrats, and anti-slavery Whigs, which was against expansion of slavery into the land taken through the Mexican Cession. They were not pushing for abolition of slavery in the existing slave states. They won a fairly large number of seats for a 3rd party, but not as powerful as either Whigs or Democrats.
The Republican Party – a broadly anti-slavery platform, with a focus on preventing expansion of slavery into the West, similar to the Free Soil Party, formed by a combination of Free Soilers and former Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats. They were galvanized into a force by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, and established that states could separately decide to be slave or free states. This led to election conflict and then war in “Bleeding Kansas“. They had a big enough tent that they could hold political power in the North.
So, the Liberty Party was tiny and radical, the Free Soil Party was small and reformist. The Republican Party arose after the collapse of the Whigs,and had a broad anti-slavery position, motivated mainly by political conflict over slavery, and thus was more actually abolitionist than the Free Soil Party.
Their abolitionism, however, wasn’t primarily moral – it was political first, and the moral position developed alongside the politics.
The abolitionists within the Republican Party were called the Radical Republicans.
They included feminists who wanted the vote, moralist Protestant Christians (against Irish and German Catholics), the temperance movement (against Irish and Germans), and former Black slaves (against white Planters in the South). The Know Nothing Party nativist faction was also part of the Radicals, and they were Protestants who hated the Irish and German immigrants, limiting the party’s appeal to white ethnics. Overall, the Radical’s primary focus was abolition and then Civil Rights for freedmen, and they reduced the party’s racist nativism.
Other factions were the Liberal Republicans, who were for reconciling with the South (basically ending the Reconstruction) for business purposes, and the Conservative Republicans, who were right wing pro-business. These pro-business factions didn’t have enough votes, so the merger with the Free Soilers and Whigs gave them enough votes to hold power.
The moralistic abolitionist position gained ground with the formation of the Republican Party, then grew during the Civil War, and then became a strong faction during the Reconstruction period. Eventually, it waned in power against the lenience that Andrew Johnson (the worst President in American history, perhaps exceeding Trump, so far) showed to ex-Confederates, reintegrating them into the US politics.
The Slave Republic and Confederacy
The Confederate States of America – Origins
Eric Foner on westward expansion and slavery