Free 1861 by Adam Goodheart Page A

sympathetic editors around the country might pick it up. An upstart newspaper could make its reputation that way; so could an ambitious young congressman.
    The intensity of racial invective in 1860 was shocking even by the standards of that time.Northern Democrats could be as offensive as their Southern counterparts. A Chicago Democratic paper warned its readers that if Lincoln’s party won in November, the entire country would soon be overrun by “naked, greasy, bandy-shanked, blubber-lipped, monkey-headed, muskrat-scented cannibals from Congo and Guinea,” who would
     live on terms of perfectequality with the proud descendants of “Washingtons [and] Lafayettes.” 33 Probably the worst offender in the North, though, was the
New York Herald.
Its editor, the acid-tonguedJames Gordon Bennett, had captured the largest circulation of any daily in the
     country by serving up a patented blend of sarcasm and sensationalism. The
Herald
’s editorial page cracked wise almost every day about “the Eternal nigger,” the “Almighty nigger,” the “Irrepressible nigger,” and the “nigger-loving black republicans.”
    Bennett’s fellow New Yorkers, in fact, seemed especially virulent in theirracism. Democrats paraded through the streets of Manhattan with banners reading “No Negro Equality.” One showed a crudely caricatured black man embracing a white girl. Another banner bore a cartoon of an African-American above the words “The successor of Abraham Lincoln in 1864.” 34 (Interestingly, the specter of a future black president cropped up repeatedly throughout the campaign as an anti-Republican scare tactic. “What will you do with these people?” one pro-Bell orator asked rhetorically. “Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your states, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be President of the United
     States?”) 35
    Many Democraticnewspapers warned of possible horrors even worse than a Negro in the White House. “There can be no reasonable doubt that the direct result of Black Republicanism … is to ferment servile insurrections in the South, and provoke such horrible atrocities as marked the negro insurrection inSt. Domingo and Hayti,” one editor wrote. The implication was
     clear: loyalty to the Union demanded loyalty, first and foremost, to the white race. 36
    Only by standing faithfully at the side of their slaveholding white brethren, many Northerners believed, could they preserve the nationintact. At a rally in theCooper Union—the same hall where Lincoln had delivered his great speech onslavery and the Constitution a few months earlier—a crowd of several thousand Democrats sang in unison:
      
We fight to save the Union, and God is on our side;
      
We fight against a faction who would let the Union slide;
      
To put down these rail-splitters, who would split it into two,
      
They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue.
    As the Democrats’ drumbeats grew louder, though, so did some Republicans’. Boston’s own Charles Sumner—the abolitionist martyr beaten almost to death on the floor of the Senate after one of his tirades against slavery—descended from the Olympian heights of Beacon Hill to stump for Lincoln just after Independence Day. “Prostrate the slave oligarchy,” the Massachusetts senator commanded a large gathering of the party
     faithful:
    Prostrate the slave oligarchy and the North shall no longer be the vassal of the South.… Its final doom may be postponed, but it is certain. Languishing, it may live yet longer; but it will surely die. Yes, fellow-citizens, surely it will die.… It can no longer rule the republic as a plantation … can no longer fasten upon the Constitution an interpretation that makes merchandise of men, and gives a disgraceful immunity to the
     brokers of human flesh and the butchers of human hearts.… It must die, it may be, as a poisoned rat dies of rage in its hole.
    For some Americans who