So, the way I see it to have slavery and racism legally in your system it has to be viewed positively within the culture of a certain population. Or at least the culture of the leading class of population mustn't see it as something negative.
So, here is my question. Have the settlers of the southern part of US in 17th and 18th century come from vastly different places, comparing to the settlers in north, that they brought their own views which then enabled slavery and racism? Or has their culture (of which we can clearly see the consequences and differences even today) developed in different direction once they came to US?
I could understand such a big difference if the settlers to the north came from, let's say, place A, and settlers to the south came from some other very distant place B. But as much as I know about history the majority of USA in those days was settled from Europe which is why I don't understand from where this difference in views towards slavery and racism came from.
Pretty much the same people settled both parts of US (or am I wrong and there were differences of which I am not aware), and yet it lead to a civil war, and even today there's a big cultural difference between south and north.
So, what were the causes that lead to creating such a different culture in the South (which enabled slavery and racism) as opposed to the North if we have in mind that both regions were populated from the same sources?
The groups of people who colonized the various regions of the eastern seaboard of the US were actually surprisingly different, despite all being of English origin. The reasons for this are the religious and political conflicts in England during the 1600s, including the English Civil War and Restoration, and the degree to which English migrants tended to settle in colonies with like-minded people.
The colonizing of New England and Pennsylvania was dominated by Puritans and Quakers, respectively. These two groups, particularly the Quakers, were middle class and egalitarian. Settlers to these colonies, generally speaking, had to pay their own way, and land was granted without respect to any claims of nobility, which tended to filter out both the poor and the aristocratic.
The Southern colonies were the social inverse of the Northern colonies. These colonies were dominated by a few aristocratic Royalists, and a dirt poor multitude. Noble settlers tended to be granted lands according to the nobility of their birth, and the poor paid their way by becoming indentured servants and working in the fields. Before Africans arrived in the American South, it was already a very unequal society whose lowest members were essentially temporary slaves.
Source: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history) by David Hackett Fischer