History of the United States I / Unit 9 USH1 1255 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Workers, Abolition and Immigration
The idea
Wage workers in the North were largely hostile to the abolition of slavery, fearing it would unleash more competition for jobs from free Black people. They were also hostile to immigration, for the same reason. The pace of immigration accelerated in the eighteen forties and fifties as Europeans were drawn to the promise of employment and land, and the Roman Catholic population of the United States, fairly small before this period, began to swell with the arrival of the Irish and the Germans.
In practice
Newcomers bringing new foods, customs and religions into cities where wages were already uncertain.
Where people slip
The people with the least to lose economically from slavery's end were the most opposed to it, because they had the most to lose from competition. That calculation, not indifference, is what abolitionists had to argue against in the North. The anchor gives no immigration figures here, and this course supplies none rather than inventing them.
Your place on the trail
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