Was there a greater concern for humanitarian rights than for profit? With the industrial revolution, it was my understanding that expanding profit in pretty much any means was prioritized.
edit: As a Canadian learning thoroughly about the Civil War for the first time, any background information would be much appreciated.
The majority of Northerners, at the start of the war, were against slavery but for economic rather than humanitarian reasons. Abolitionists who opposed slavery on moral grounds absolutely existed but they were few in number and their attempts to gain direct political traction had failed miserably for over a decade. Far more northerners opposed slavery because it ran counter to Free Labor ideology, a dominant economic perspective at the time that stressed the importance of prosperity through personal hard work and entrepreneurship.
Slavery ran counter to these ideals because it robbed black slaves of the fruits of their own labor and also allowed white slaveowners to achieve prosperity through the exploitation of others' labor. Northerners were highly racist as a population and weren't advocating for the welfare of the slaves so much as they were advocating against a system based on the unfair exploitation of labor. What's more, both the North and the South coveted the western territories as spaces for expansion and economic opportunity. If slavery spread to the west it would create economic competition on unfair terms (how can a single white northerner compete with a southern neighbor who has 10 slaves working for him?) and pose a very real threat to the viability of free labor.
It's no coincidence that a central plank of the Republican party (which formed in the 1850s as a direct result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threatened to allow slavery in new territories) was the non-extension of slavery.
Now, New England did have many textile mills using southern cotton (as did Britain and France), but the majority of northerners did not work in that industry. Many worked in other manufacturing/service sectors and there were of course many farmers, but slavery was still widely opposed all the same. So it's not wholly accurate to say that northerners cared about profit so much as economic ideologies that prioritized free labor and liberal policies like freedom of contract. This gets basically confirmed in the Reconstruction era, when efforts toward racial equality are ultimately sidelined by northern politicians who care more about safeguarding free labor in light of the coming Gilded Age.