I have not seen any mention of the North's concern about the "White Slave". Since slavery was defined as a racial thing, and people born to slaves inherited being a slave, the possiblity existed of a slave being born that was mostly white, but a slave since their mother was a slave. It would only take about four generations for a "white slave" to emerge.
It was the possibility of white slaves that was used as propaganda to abolish slavery, so that even if a Northerner felt that blacks should be slaves (racial inheritance), they could not intellectually support slavery if there was the possibility that a white person could be born a slave. Ref: http://scholarspublishing.com/ "Tenzer explains that in the antebellum South, the children of slave mothers were slaves from the moment of birth. Even though miscegenation lightened skin color, virtually white slave children were still considered mulattoes and remained slaves nonetheless, even after an endless number of generations went by and all discernible Negroid traits were long gone. A good example is a case he reports in which a slave woman who was one sixty-fourth black was on the auction block. One of her great-great-great-great grandparents was black. Not all slaves in the South were black, and this phenomenon of white slaves, whites with a distant black ancestor, was to have unexpected political consequences." "A large number of white slaves escaped to the Northern states hoping to pass into free white society, and slave catchers went North looking for them. This posed a direct threat to white people living in the North because under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, runaway slaves could be reclaimed without due process, which in effect allowed for free whites to be mistakenly seized." Any thoughts on this? The claim on this web site is that this is the real reason for the civil war. Nerd From Hell _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
