Even then, then majority of people living in those states live along the coastline because they were settled for their prime Great Lake coastline in order to make trade easier.
The North had little need for slavery to begin with. It’s why it never caught on because they didn’t have massive tracks of farmland to justify having fifty or a hundred slaves.
Also, abolitionism became a thing right around the time those states began to ban it. Besides, it’s easier to convince people who don’t own slaves to ban the institution outright.
Hard to convince a wealthy plantation owner to get rid of his free labor. Instead let's just start a war with the clearly stated goal of keeping our free labor.
No, more like “hard to convince a society that has lived with it on a daily basis to end it without having some form of social and political repercussions.”
And, even then, states like New York profited from the slave trade as a result of being a major port city. So, even though the banned it, they remained an important hub of keeping it going.
They didn’t want to end the institution because they weren’t fighting for that purpose, especially the countless thousands of Irishmen drafted to fight the war.
The rioters were pissed that blacks could take their jobs, and that rich people could get out of serving. A similar provision in the south was that a man with 20 or more slaves was exempt from the draft
