Why did slavery never gain a strong foothold in the north?

Answer 1

Its a little known fact today that slavery persisted on a small scale in most northern states until after the Civil War, when the remaining slaves in all states were freed by the 13th Amendment late in 1865. Many northern states had followed the "Pennsylvania Plan" in "abolishing slavery". This plan provided that upon reaching the age of 18 young slaves became free. Any slave who was already 18 or older, however, remained a slave for life. This plan would eventually abolish slavery, but it was a very gradual process; no one was freed by these laws until the first slave had an 18th birthday after the law became effective. See the "related link" below for more information on slavery in the north.

There are a few reasons slavery was found to be more profitable in southern areas, and thus was held to be a more crucial system. The northern states had been settled first, and, while both north and south almost everyone was a farmer, in the north the farms tended to be small, family operations. There was no real natural barrier to westward expansion, such as the Appalachian Mountains create south of Pennsylvania. The Proclamation Line of 1763 was part of the peace that ended the French and Indian War, and forbid settlement west of the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is the easternmost edge of the Appalachians, the first mountains encountered as settlers pushed into the back country of the southern colonies. Thus in the south, where these mountains present a barrier to westward expansion, settlers were forbidden to go until after the Revolution. Even after the Revolution, settlers craving the land to the west of the mountains had the additional problem that there were strong Indian tribes already there - the Cherokees, the Creeks, and beyond them the remainder of the Five Civilized Tribes. So only after the Creek Indian War, and the Indian Removal during Jackson's presidency, did large portions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and other southern territory suddenly become open to settlement. This created a situation where wealthy or industrious people could acquire large tracts of land, to go into farming on a large scale. Meanwhile the invention of the cotton gin by a Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, suddenly made cotton farming a very profitable operation. Cotton had always been a good fiber for making cloth, but taking the cotton bolls from the plant, and removing the seeds so that you had left only fibers which could be spun into thread and then woven into cloth, was a very labor intensive process. Before the cotton gin it had to be done by hand, and took a long time to produce only small amounts of usable cotton. So coincident with the sudden opening of large tracts of what had been Indian land, the development of the cotton gin suddenly made large scale cotton cultivation not just possible, but tremendously profitable, and the newly opened lands were ideally suited for growing cotton. This was a set of circumstances that almost demanded the creation of a plantation system. There was no non-slave labor to be had, as newly arriving white people could just go get their own land, cheaply or free basically, north or south. After the Revolution the "Old Northwest", the five states north of the Ohio River, west of Pennsylvania but east of the Mississippi, were sometimes called the "western reserve". The Old Northwest eventually became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. The plan was to use this land to pay the soldiers of the Revolution, since there was no money in the Treasury to pay them. So this area north of the Ohio - all of which entered the Union as free states - was the first to be surveyed into "sections" (a square mile) and "quarter sections" (160 acres) which could be claimed by settlers, setting up family farms. I suppose congress decided to start making the public lands available with this area because promises had been made to the Revolutionary veterans but also because this land was the most accessible using the transportation route of the Ohio River, there being no mountain barrier, or occupying large groups of Indians to prevent their settlement. What tribes there were had their power broken at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Tecumseh tried to unite the tribes of the Old Northwest to resist white incursion, but was defeated and killed in 1811.

Answer 2

Slavery did have a strong foothold in the north. As the north industrialized, slavery became less useful, and thus it fell out of favor in the north earlier than in the south.