United States | News & Politics

People were generally onboard with liberating plantations, but the question of what to do with the previously disenfranchised was asked, framed, and guided by the previously slave owners. There was the option to give out land and cast a broad social safety net, but White hand wringing abolitionists couldn't get passed "what if Blacks are lazy and stealing from me?" So they leaned on "they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps", but to clear their consciences they also needed to claim they were lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps as proof that they'd contributed to building a system where that's possible. Yada yada, the system that manifested was wage slavery, a late 19th century nail in the coffin currently burying us alive!