Charles Dickens was a Unitarian. The Unitarians were central to the abolitionist movement and the push for war.
Nathan Appleton was a Unitarian textile industrialist in Massachusetts. His father-in-law called him a “cotton abolitionist”, meaning that Appleton was more interested in controlling the supply chain of cotton to his textile mills than the plight of Southern slaves.
Appleton strove to improve the working conditions of textile mill workers in Massachusetts, compared to the horrific conditions he had seen in Manchester, England. But, the economic recession in the 1850s and new mill owners putting more of the profits in the hands of investors led to the ruination of the lives of US textile workers in the North.
Appleton did not want a war. He wanted the gradual elimination of slavery, in order to get rid of the high capital cost of slaves. Slaves cost as much as a horse.
But, Appleton bought his daughter and son-in-law, the poet Longfellow, a mansion in Cambridge, which became a meeting place for more ardent abolitionists.
In a complicated way, the culture of Northern elite was bent on the removal of slavery in the South, in the name of abolition, but this was financially supported by the bankers and industrialists in the North, whose carpetbaggers bought up the agriculture and industry in the South, as soon as Sherman’s armies got rid of the high capital cost of slaves.
Not much was done to help the freed slaves, by the abolitionists, for 100 years. Because, there was no money in it.
