The author of Abraham Africanus I, Alexander del Mar, was a New York–based financial journalist and historian who fiercely opposed the Civil War and Lincoln’s policies. After the war, del Mar was slated to be the secretary of the treasury under the Democrat Horatio Seymour, who campaigned against Ulysses S. Grant under the motto: “This is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.”25
A similar view informs Abraham Africanus I. For two decades, readers had gobbled up pulp fiction about the “mysteries” of American cities, which sensationalized debauchery and wickedness behind the closed doors of the rich and famous. Abraham Africanus I offered, in the words of its subtitle, Mysteries of the White House. The fifty-seven-page pamphlet, which sold for fifteen cents, blended common elements of the mysteries genre—hidden corruption, substance abuse, demonic conspiracies—and pointed them at Lincoln. The novella has Lincoln, here called Bram, drinking liquor by his fireplace when, in an alcoholic daze, he sees Satan, who puts him into a mesmeric trance. Bram signs a contract in his own blood whereby he exchanges his soul for the guarantee of another presidential term. He agrees to prevent peace by stirring up “this all-fired nigger question,” waging an illegal war, violating the Constitution, telling vulgar stories, and using outward honesty as a cover for “false promises” and “every imaginable form of low cunning.”26 Satan says, “YOU AGREE TO BRING TO DEATH ONE MILLION OF HUMAN BEINGS; and I’ll agree to give you the Presidency.” The devil assures Bram that the two of them will tell jokes to each other in “a hotel down in hell,” as opposed to Stephen Douglas, who has gone to heaven. Bram willingly surrenders himself to Satan, who tells him, “A slave you are, and though much bigger, / As much a slave as any nigger.”
No scattered literary blast against Lincoln would be complete without a faux biblical narrative. The nineteenth century was full of revisions of the Bible, from the Book of Mormon through Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which the poet called “the New Bible”) to Ben-Hur, by the ex-Union general Lew Wallace.27 Lincoln himself, as seen earlier, had participated in the genre at twenty in Indiana with his spoof “Chronicles of Reuben.”
Two satirical biblical rewrites praised in the Copperhead press—Book of the Prophet Stephen, Son of Douglas and Revelations; A Companion of the “New Gospel of Peace,” According to Abraham—pamphlets written in pseudo-biblical language and numbered passages, presented racist themes in a mock-formal way.
Revelations describes an ancient city, Repuplicanus, whose citizens “were not like other men; for they believed black was white, only more so.”28 The “devil” they were possessed by “means Niggero in the original.” The people erected an altar in which they placed “the figure of our god, even a molten Niggero, and fall down and worship it in the sight of all the people.” They sing praise to “our Great Potentate” (Lincoln). Among his preachers are “Philip the Amalgamator” (the abolitionist Wendell Phillips), who “may have taken his wife from among the daughters of Niggero,” and “Cheeverite” (the antislavery minister George B. Cheever), “who calleth Niggero his better.”
The other popular biblical narrative, Book of the Prophet Stephen, Son of Douglas, appeared in 1863, followed by a Second Book in 1864. It took as its premise that Lincoln had violated the principle laid down before the war by his Illinois opponent Stephen Douglas: “I hold that this Government was made on the WHITE BASIS, by WHITE MEN, for the benefit of WHITE MEN, and their POSTERITY, forever.”29 The book tells of King Abraham, who grew furious when certain people in his kingdom—those in Sunland (the South) and members of the Copperhead “tribe”—failed to bow down to his Black Idol and instead wanted to continue worshipping white idols. Following the command of the god Woolly Dragon, King Abraham (nicknamed King of the Woollyheads) waged war on the harmless people of Sunland. During the bloody war, the king issued a proclamation that declared the Bible invalid because it endorsed slavery. He also revoked the Constitution and all existing laws, for he wanted his Black Idol alone to be worshipped, and he wished whites to marry Negroes. In the Second Book, the Woollyhead King becomes a strong advocate of miscegenation.
The latter topic gained notoriety from the anti-Republican pamphlet that introduced the term to the language, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. A spurious mix of ethnographical lingo and idealistic visions of racial improvement, the pamphlet pretended to reveal that miscegenation (a neologism from the Latin miscere, to mix, and genus, race) would in time yield a superior new race. Two writers associated with the Democratic paper the New York World, managing editor David Goodman Croly and reporter George Wakeman, masqueraded as Republican champions of the theory. On Christmas Day 1863, they mailed the pamphlet to antislavery leaders, requesting blurbs. Several abolitionists took the bait and showered praise on it. In a long, enthusiastic review in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Parker Pillsbury declared that the pamphlet had “cheered and gladdened a winter morning” that had begun “in cloud and shadow.” Predicting that there would be “a progressive intermingling,” as “black and white are disposed to seek each other in marriage,” Pillsbury wrote, “We are sure that many will agree with us in finding the pamphlet interesting and instructive, and in thanking the unknown author for it.”30 Henry Ward Beecher’s response was also positive: “We believe the whole human race are one family,” and “whites and blacks should intermarry if they wish.”31
Others, such as Lucretia Mott, sniffed deception, but the pamphlet was not revealed as a hoax until after the November election. The World then boasted that “the doctrine of ‘Miscegenation,’ conceived as a satire, was received as a sermon” and as “a glad tidings of great joy” by antislavery devotees.32
The pamphlet had indeed exploited a position actually advocated by antislavery reformers and politicians, some of whom had fought for years against state bans on interracial marriages. Such bans reached back to colonial times, when Massachusetts and six other colonies outlawed interracial marriage under British law.33 After independence, existing bans remained and others arrived when new states entered the Union. Pennsylvania canceled its ban in 1880, but it was the exception to the rule of ongoing local antimiscegenation laws. The longevity of such laws varied from state to state: examples of the lifespans of laws include Rhode Island (1798–1881), Michigan (1838–1883), California (1850–1948), and Indiana (1818–1965). The record holders for longevity were Virginia and Maryland, which imposed bans, respectively, in 1691 and 1692 that lasted until 1967, the year the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia ruled that state bans on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Loving v. Virginia ended the antimiscegenation laws in sixteen states, all of them in the South.
Abolitionists had made it part of their program to challenge marriage restrictions based on race. They succeeded in Massachusetts, where they won a cancellation of the ban in 1843. Partly as a result of this success, antislavery politicians, including Lincoln, were accused of advocating interracial marriage. Lincoln had faced pressure on the issue in Illinois in the 1850s, where amalgamation, as it was then called, had been legally proscribed in 1829—a ban that lasted in the state until 1874.
In his political battles of the 1850s, Lincoln danced around the issue. Why were Democrats so eager to defend the law banning racial intermarriage? he asked. Was Stephen Douglas so tempted to marry a black woman that he had to be restrained from doing so by law? Amalgamation, Lincoln pointed out, most frequently occurred in the slaveholding South, whose growing mulatto population revealed the sexual violation of enslaved women. As for the charges leveled at Republicans, he remarked that the “one distinguished instance” of amalgamation that he knew of was that of a Democrat, “Judge Douglas’s old friend Colonel Richard M. Johnson” (Martin Van Buren’s vice president, who reportedly had a black common-law wife by whom he’d sired two children).34 In what became Lincoln’s most widely quoted statement on the topic, he said, “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.]” This statement, leavened by what then passed for humor, positioned Lincoln squarely among the great bulk of the population of the North who opposed slavery without believing in political or social equality.
Did he ever express his actual view of miscegenation? It would seem so. When in October 1858 he was asked what he thought of the Illinois law banning interracial marriage, he replied, “The law means nothing. I shall never marry a negress, but I have no objection to anyone else doing so. If a white man wants to marry a negro woman, let them do it—if the negro woman can stand it.”35
In the 1860 presidential race, the New York Herald told readers that the choice was between white rule under Democrats or Negro rule under Black Republicans. “Vote against Lincoln and negro suffrage,” the paper advised; it warned that “the millennium of Republican rule” would be “African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo Saxon, Celtic, and Teutonic races.”36
Such warnings about Lincoln reached a fever pitch in the 1864 presidential race, during the furor over miscegenation. Four more years of Lincoln, opponents declared, would bring the twin horrors of black citizenship and interracial marriage.
In a desperate effort to topple Lincoln, Democrats launched miscegenation as a political weapon. A Democratic broadside, Black Republican Prayer, transformed the Lord’s Prayer into an anti-Lincoln diatribe. The prayer began in sarcastic reverence—“Abraham Lincoln—who art in the White House—gloried be thy name”—and went on to praise the “Royal Highness” who had spurned the Constitution in order to “free dear Sambo—that he may become white and equal to ourselves.” The prayer continued as an homage to “the patriarch Abraham, sent on earth for the salvation of poor Sambo.” The concluding benediction predicted the racially mixed America Lincoln would create:
May the blessings of emancipation extend throughout our unhappy land—and the illustrious sweet-scented Sambo nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman—that she may be quickened by the pure blood of the majestic African—and the spirit of Amalgamation shine forth in all its splendor and glory—that we may be a regenerated nation of half breeds, mongrels, and the distinction of color be forever consigned to oblivion—and that we may live in beds of fraternal love, union and equality with the Almighty Nigger—henceforward now and forever—Amen.37
In a speech in the House of Representatives titled “Miscegenation or Amalgamation,” the Copperhead Samuel Cox lamented that Attorney General Bates had “declared the African to be a citizen,” Secretary of State Seward had granted him a passport, and “the President of the United States calls him an American citizen of African descent.” The Senate, moreover, had been “discussing African equality in street cars.” With the Republican Party “moving steadily forward to perfect social equality of black and white,” Cox fulminated, Lincoln’s presidency could “only end in this detestable doctrine of—Miscegenation!”38
Lincoln unwittingly mired himself in the miscegenation controversy even more deeply by making a statement that he thought would foster unity but in fact stimulated a torrent of right-wing criticism. On March 21, 1864, while accepting an honorary membership given him by the New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association, Lincoln told his largely Irish audience that workers of all races should sympathize with one another. Noting that the draft riots the previous summer had witnessed “the hanging of some working people by other working people,” he chided, “It should never be so.” Workers, he advised, should “beware of prejudice, . . . division and hostility among themselves. . . . The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.”39
To his critics, these remarks were an open call for miscegenation. When the authors of “Miscegenation” sent him their pamphlet for his comments, they said they were inspired to do so by “your speech to the New-York workingmen, in which you recognize the social and political equality of the white and colored laborer.” Lincoln did not respond to the pamphlet. A Copperhead newspaper ranted, “Mr. Abraham Lincoln deliberately . . . classes labouring white men with negroes. . . . In this brief sentence we have the new doctrine of ‘miscegenation’ or amalgamation officially announced.”40 A pamphlet titled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party pointed to Lincoln’s workingmen’s speech as evidence that “miscegenation is but another pet object of the Lincoln party, of the same stamp with emancipation, confiscation, and subjugation.”41 The New- York Freeman’s Journal averred that the “beastly doctrine of the intermarriage of black men with white women” was now “openly and publicly avowed and indorsed and encouraged by the President of the United States. . . . Filthy buck niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President’s levees.”42
This theme of Lincoln’s personal closeness to blacks became an obsession of Dr. John H. Van Evrie, editor of the Day-Book and Weekly Caucasian (New York). Van Evrie, who in 1856 had coined the term white supremacy, was an advocate of polygenesis, the theory that blacks and whites were not different types of humans but rather were different species.43 Because he considered blacks innately inferior, their proper condition was slavery. Van Evrie’s newspaper proudly proclaimed its guiding principle: “It is absolutely certain that this Government was made by White Men, for White Men and their posterity forever.”44 Van Evrie asserted that Lincoln, in his March address to the New York workers, had insulted “every white workingman by including him in the category of negroes, or, in other words, calling him a nigger!”45
In July 1864, Van Evrie advertised a twenty-five-cent lithograph, Miscegenation, or The Millennium of Abolitionism, that pictured Lincoln and other antislavery leaders consorting with blacks in a park. In the cartoon, Charles Sumner introduces “Miss Dinah, Arabella, Aramintha Squash” to Lincoln, who bends down and says to her, “I shall be proud to number among my intimate friends any member of the Squash family, especially the little Squashes.” The woman replies, “Ise ’quainted wid Missus Linkum I is, washed for her ’fore de hebenly Miscegenation times was cum. Dont do nuffin now but gallevant ’round wid de white gemmen!” Other images in the cartoon depict whites and blacks in various phases of intimate contact.
In October, Van Erie advertised a similar cartoon, this one based on a dance attended by African American women at the Lincoln campaign headquarters in New York. The Miscegenation Ball showed white men dancing with or making passes at black women. In the background is a portrait of Lincoln and, in the foreground, a banner proclaiming “Universal Freedom, One Constitution, One Destiny. Abraham Lincoln Prest
Miscegenation, however, was actually too tame for Van Evrie, who published a revised version of an early book and titled it Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races: An Answer to “Miscegenation.” Since Van Evrie assumed that Lincoln, along with all other Republicans, accepted miscegenation, he tried to make a firm case for the restoration of slavery. “Miscegenation is Monarchy; Subgenation [that is, slavery] is Democracy,” Van Evrie wrote. “When Lincoln issued his Miscegenation Proclamation, he proclaimed a monarchy.”48
One might want to dismiss Van Evrie, who found even Copperheads too mild, as an aberration, but similar themes fueled the mainstream Democratic presidential campaign effort in 1864. At a huge McClellan rally in September in Cincinnati, campaign placards featured the usual anti-Lincoln thrusts (“Picayune Butler” sung in the presence of the Antietam dead; “Abraham 1st” dedicated to
