Nineteenth-century American newspapers were, in general, partisan in their politics, and the New York World was a Democrat paper. In 1863, two writers for the World, George Wakeman and David Goodman Croly, wrote a 72-page pamphlet that was published anonymously with the title, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.
The title term of the pamphlet was a new coinage, from the Latin words for “mix” and “race,” and the subject was decidedly inflammatory. During his 1858 debates with Democrats Stephen Douglass, Abraham Lincoln had been forced to stipulate that while he was opposed to slavery, he was not an advocate of “social equality” and certainly not in favor what that loaded phrase implied, “amalgamation” as it was then commonly termed. Republicans were very sensitive to such accusations, since even those whites who adamantly opposed slavery were in general horrifed by the thought of “amalgamation.” (Indeed, there was a strong element of white separatism in the “Free Soil” movement, and some Midwestern states had antebellum laws forbidding free blacks from settling there.)
Such was the context, then, within which the Miscegenation pamphlet was anonymously published. Though written by two Democrats, the argument was a sort of deadpan satire, written as a political hoax. The pamphlet argued in favor of interracial unions, asserting that mixed-race nations were actually superior to mono-racial nations, and put that argument into an explicitly political context:
It is idle to maintain that this present war is not a war for the negro … It is a war, if you please, of amalgamation … a war looking, as its final fruit, to the blending of the white and black… Let the war go on… until church, and state, and society recognize not only the propriety but the necessity of the fusion of the white and black—in short, until the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our Presidents, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.
To further their hoax, Wakeman and Croly sent their disingenuous pamphlet to leading abolitionists, requesting their endorsements, which some of them willingly supplied in letters. The pamphlet was also advertised in abolitionist journals, and then the authors — whose identities were not discovered until years later — sprang their trap.
They provided copies of Miscegenation and of the abolitionist letters praising the pamphlet to an Ohio Democratic congressman, who gave a February 1864 speech in Congress denouncing the pamphlet’s doctrine and its advocates, suggesting that it expressed the Republican Party’s secret radical policy goals. A month later, Horace Greeley of the Republican paper, the New York Tribune, replied to Cox’s speech in an editorial that conveyed a laissez-faire attitude toward interracial marriage. In response, the World — the Democrat paper for which the pamphlet’s anonymous authors worked — published its own editorial, declaring that “the leading Republican journal of the country is the unblushing advocate of ‘miscegenation,’ which it ranks with the highest questions of social and political philosophy.” Thus began a national controversy that continued for months. Continue reading Did You Know the Word ‘Miscegenation’ Was Invented by Democrats as a Smear? →
