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Not very much.

Most Northerners were not abolitionists. They were ready to tolerate slavery in its traditional heartlands, and enjoy the cotton revenues that went with it.

The reason why most of them wanted to forbid more slave-states was to preseve the Northern majority in Congress and continue to protect manufacturing industry via the high taxes on imported goods that the South mostly needed.

However, if the Abolitionists were not very numerous, many of them were influential and impossible to ignore in Congress. The various controversies of the 1850's (Fugitive Slave Law, Publication of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', the Kansas vote etc.) set up an increasingly fierce debate that could only end in war.

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15y ago

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