@snood,
Well, sort of . . . that would have been the conscious attitudes which predominated, certainly. However, i suggest to you that abolitionists were motivated in large measure by religious conviction. It is worth keeping in mind that many of the most militant abolitionists came from wealthy or at least comfortably well-off New England families, many of whose wealth was founded on a long and lucrative involvement in the slave trade by their ancestors. In the years before the revolution, many New Englanders followed an established trade route. They would take rum to England and Holland (often smuggling--both because it was technically illegal to trade directly with Holland, and because there were Englishman prepared to take their rum cargo off their ships and pay cash on the barrelhead, at little risk to the Yankee merchants), and there they would pick up cheap trade goods. They would use those trade goods to buy slaves in west Africa, and then take the slaves to the West Indies, and there would buy molasses (often, once again, smuggling, because they would buy molasses from French and Dutch-controlled islands, and even if bought from English-controlled islands, they would smuggle it back into New England). With that molasses, they'd make more rum, and start the cycle over again.
There was a concommitant trade cycle--in the South, especially in South Carolina, the planters would produce livestock and crops for sale in the West Indies (in South Carolina they grew rice, a cheap way to feed slaves). They'd then buy slaves in the West Indies to take back to mainland North America.
After the revolution, though, those trade routes withered, although southerners could still sell rice and livestock in the West Indies. They'd be taking a risk to attempt to smuggle in slaves, though, and usually didn't. The constitution prohibited the slave trade after 1808. The New England merchants dropped out of the slave trade pretty quickly, and it just wasn't worth the risk for southern planters. Slave smuggling continued, though--after the War of 1812, the Lafitte brothers of Louisiana smuggled in slaves out of their base in Galvez Town (modern Galveston), then a part of Mexico. They were briefly abetted in this by James Bowie--"hero" of the Alamo.
But on balance, slavery was not the huge financial incentive that people claim it was. The same thing happened in the American south that happened in the western Roman Empire. Huge slave driven operations in olive oil, wine, pottery and cloth were set up by members of the senatorial class in Rome, and managed for them by members of the order of
Equites, which is usually translated as "knights." Little understanding what we call basic economics, they destroyed the economy of the western empire, although it took centuries. Small holders and small craftsmen couldn't compete with the slave driven enterprises, so they would sometime (but not often) migrate to other parts of the empire, or they would drift into the cities, mostly Rome, looking for occasional casual labor and getting the dole--the "bread and circuses" which wise imperial administrations provided them. The
latifundia, the large slave-driven entrerprises, increasingly relied on purchases by the imperial adminsitration, and the imperial administration in turn debased the currency to meet its expenses, leading to an artificial and accelerating inflation. Coins of the later empire struck in the western portion reached the point where they had as little as 4% silver in them, the rest being mostly lead. People may not have understood the economics, but they sure knew worthless coins when they were foisted on them--prices inevitably rose continuously.
A similar thing happened in the American south. Small holders who couldn't afford slaves couldn't produce enough tobacco or cotton to make a decent living, and institutions like the tobacco autction barns (the only places where buyers would come for their tobacco) institutionalized the lack of parity. To get your crop into the tobacco barns, you had to know somebody, and small holders usually ended up selling their crop to a large planter for far less than they would have gotten if they could have freely participated in the auction. As recently as the early 1980s, i heard farmers in North Carolina complaining about the corruption of the tobacco barns, so it seems that some things haven't changed much.
Small craftsmen faced the same kind of almost insurmountable competition. Why would a planter go to a blacksmith in town when he could simply train one of his more biddable slaves in the trade, or borrow a slave already trained as a smith from another planter? This created two economies in the south--the economy of the planters and the depressed economy of the small holders and small craftsmen. If you made furniture locally, your only likely customers were other poor small holders or small craftsman. Those members of this class had few options, either hereditary poverty or getting out and going north.
As early as 1758, George Washington identified the system of shameless exploitation by which English merchants mulcted American planters. He diversified his crops, stopped growing tobacco for sale to the English traders, and spent years paying off what he and the Mount Vernon estate (he inherited the estate from his half brother) owed in England. But most planters simply continued their relationships with the English merchants, or formed new ones with the French. It was a lazy man's way of doing business--the small ships of the European trading houses could often sail up coastal rivers and dock right at the plantation, and when they loaded their cargo, they'd be given a list of goods the planter wanted them to bring back on the next voyage. The English sold them shoddy goods at outrageous prices, and they were so addicted to the system that southern states steadily and vociferous opposed the tariffs designed to protect New England manufacturing--even though, essentially, they were being robbed by the Europeans.
But people didn't understand economics in that kind of detail then, and tradition would have been the biggest motivating factor. Contemporty "experts" continue to claim that there was an enormous economic benefit to slavery, but it benefited only a priveleged minority in the South. So certain portions of the southern population of small holders undoubtedly supported slavery because they had ambitions of being slave-owners themselves some day. Sort of like the poor saps who support Republican tax cuts which don't benefit them because they dream of being rich themselves some day. By and large, one of the most persistent myths of American history is that slavery was a big economic benefit. While it is true that a great deal of our foreign exchange came from tobacco and cotton, it is not necessarily true that that foreign exchange was necessary to the nation's economic health. Even without the tariff which they hoped would protect their industries, northern manufacturers had, until the early 20th century, an almost inexhaustible market for their goods among the immigrants who came here and headed west to get cheap land. It's a toss-up whether the foreign exchange from slave-produced crops like tobacco and cotton outweighed the constant, institutional economic depression for farmers and small craftsmen in the South, and i have always believed that more
white people suffered as a result of slavery than the number who benefited from it.
So, to actually return to your question--yes, people thought in those terms then, and largely still think in those terms now. However, as with almost every field of human study--it's not just that simple.
