This is true. Northerners were no better. The wage slavery they kept many immigrants in, especially the Irish, was just as brutal. How many were murdered and thrown away like garbage?

What about the railroad's treatment of Asians?

The still ongoing genocide of Indigenous Americans?

The brutal conditions migrant Hispanic workers still face? Even today?

What always gets me about the "Virtuous Northerners" narrative? It always very conveniently excludes the part they played in perpetuating slavery. It's always the same old story. Labor exploitation. There wouldn't have been a need to keep slaves then, if the capital holders were willing to pay a fair price for goods and resources instead of manipulating costs in order to extract profit. It gets down to profits, every time.

And nothing has changed. What's the difference between then and the diamond mines today? Or fast fashion?

Yankee abolitionists protested against the South as a region and also plantation owners (that last bit was fair enough). But you never hear about widespread and sustained boycotts of the products that cotton created though, do you? Never hear about a campaign to give up tobacco. They never demanded their own lawmakers to pass laws discouraging or restricting raw materials produced by slave labor. And they sure as hell never saw to the better treatment of their own wage slaves, which is still a form of slavery.

The quest for endless and greater profits is the reason why all this still exists today. And why women are being disenfranchised AGAIN. Gotta have that free labor.