The whole free the slaves thing is a complicated mixed bag. Some people were for it because they wanted to ship blacks to northern factories to work. Some people wanted to end it because they didn't like having to compete with the cheaper goods of slave labor. Sure, they'd pay them, but the north didn't exactly welcome blacks with open arms, and the factories technically treated them like slaves.

Doesn't change the fact that hundreds of thousands of white people died to end slavery, or that the Republican party was the one to end slavery. But a lot of people had their own motives. After all, not everyone in the north were Republican. And while a lot of people didn't mind slaves being freed, they didn't really want a load of recently freed black people thrust upon them and flooding their towns, especially since that also meant job competition, and that's completely understandable.

That was part of the problem with slaves migrating to northern states. Like for example, we might want Mexicans to be prosperous in their own country and to have rights so they can stay where the fuck they are and leave us alone and not flood our cities to take prosperity and opportunity from us locally. Yet that's exactly what former slaves did in the north. People were behind freeing the slaves, but they didn't want to become the forced benefactors of the freed slaves. Yet that's exactly what happened, and that is one travesty that is overlooked when it comes to the end of slavery. They forced millions of freed slaves on towns, and it caused a lot of chaos and suffering for the very people who freed the slaves.

You'll often see writings of former slaves about how they were treated worse in the north than they were by their former slave masters. I think it's not that simple though. As Sowell says "When you're used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination". While that doesn't describe things exactly, the point is that slaves weren't treated as badly in general as history paints it, so when they got out into the world as free people and realized that the free world was a bit more harsh in some senses, they viewed things negatively that they shouldn't have. Effectively, slaves going into the free world was the equivalent to millions of people suddenly being forced off welfare and steady work that provided at least basic benefits and a stable environment.

While slavery was slavery, there were a lot of securities/benefits that slaves had. For example, as slaves, they never really had to worry about finding a hot meal or a warm bed. They had a sense of community with their own kind. Ending slavery kind of scattered all that into the wind, and then instead of a structured life with a steady flow of resources and fixed expectations, they had nothing but chaos and unpredictability as freed people, having to worry about where their next meal would come from, where they would sleep, etc.

Again that doesn't mean slavery was good, but there were definitely changes that weren't as simple as "you're free now, go be merry!". When you're used to someone figuring out your daily schedule for you whole life, that can be hard to let go. That's why a lot of former slaves didn't even know what to do with freedom.

But overall, the fact still remains that the Democrats were the slave masters, and the Republicans freed them. But it was also handled somewhat poorly. They should not have thrusted former slaves into northern areas, and should have not allowed different races to accept different wages. That was part of the problem, former slaves were more than willing to accept fractions of the wages that whites were paid, and that created serious problems.

We often hear things like "Chinese immigrants came to America to build the railroad! We owe them!", as if they noble-ly came to build it for America, when the reality is they came to do it because they had no jobs in their own country and the jobs they could get would pay a fraction of what the railroad would pay them, even if the railroad was actually paying them much less than whites.

Whites would have been more than willing to build the railroads, but they weren't paying livable wages for living in America. Most of the Chinese who worked on the railroad went back to China, and with the amount of money they made and the exchange rates, they effectively went back to China a lot wealthier, many went back effectively as millionaires in comparison to what the locals were paid in China. So while they weren't paid a livable wage to live in America, they were payed more than a livable wage if they were to go back and spend that money in China, which is why it doesn't garner much sympathy from me when history tries to act like they were taken advantage of. No, Americans WERE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF. They stole work from Americans by undercutting them, then took that wealth out of the country. When wealth doesn't recirculate back through the local economy, that's almost as good as it being counterfeit money.

So while the slaves were free, them choosing to work for less, and laws not being set in place that forced businesses to pay the same wages to men of all races, forced whites into poverty and robbed them of opportunity, as good as affirmative action hiring does today. People only focus on them being paid less, but them having that job at all even if they were paid less, meant that it was opportunity taken from others by their very existence and willingness to work for less. Yet all you hear about it "Oh those poor blacks/asians, they were paid less". When the other side of the coin is, "Actually, those poor whites, because they have opportunity taken from them by someone else willing to undercut them out of the job".

Basically, the freed slaves did to America, what Mexicans do to America today. And it causes the same negative economic effects. So they may have been freed slaves, but I don't have much sympathy for them having been paid less, because them choosing to work for less meant that they undercut other people out of the opportunity they took for themselves.