The First Democratic Hoax Against the Republican Party

Miscegenation

 The Theory of the Blending of the Races

In 1864, an anonymous hardbound pamphlet was published entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The word "miscegenation" was coined by the authors who claimed it was a scientific theory describing how racial blending enhances humanity. The pamphlet encouraged the interbreeding of people from different racial or ethnic groups through marriage or sexual relations.

During the Civil War, the North was terrified that freed slaves would swarm to their states. Racial bigotry was real and serious. Northerners were frightened for good reasons. For seven decades slaveholders and their Democratic Party allies had exclaimed on the floor of Congress, in newspapers, in churches, and in pubs that emancipation would cause hordes of black men to migrate north to take the White man’s job and daughters. Tribal instincts were fanned until they were burned into the subconscious of most Americans.

After their defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, savvy Confederates knew the war was lost and placed their hope on a General McClellan victory in the Union presidential election. Running as a Peace Democrat, the South assumed McClellan would negotiate a peace that would include independence and retain the institution of slavery.

This is the environment that Miscegenation was tossed into. An anonymous publication that purported to be the official position of the Republican Party. Here are a couple of quotes.

The object of this work is to show that the amalgamation of the two races is not only desirable, but that it is inevitable, and that the sooner it is accomplished the better for all concerned.

The Republican party, in its platform of 1860, implicitly favored this great reform. Let us carry it to its logical conclusion! Encourage intermarriages; let the white daughters of the North wed the sable sons of Africa. Thus, shall we purify the Republic and fulfill its destiny as a beacon of liberty?

Miscegenation was published in December 1863, and over five thousand copies were distributed with countless newspaper articles and reviews. In July of 1864, the New York Times published an article tying the pamphlet to the pro-Confederate New York World. This article and those that followed proved that the pamphlet was published by Democrats to harm Abraham Lincoln’s chances of reelection.

The pamphlet is an interesting read and quite artful in its subterfuge. The hoax fooled many at the time and the term miscegenation has endured. Additionally, it seems that hoaxes have become an integral part of the Democratic Party's DNA.

 

Dixie Betrayed by Davis J. Eicher

Dixie Betrayed, How the South Really Lost The Civil War by Davis J. Eicher

The last words of Eicher’s book are “Jefferson Davis had lost his power as Confederate president — but not before the whole cause of the Confederacy was lost. Dixie was Betrayed.”

The title and these final words betray the worth of this book. Nearly twenty thousand books have been written about Lincoln and almost a hundred thousand about the Civil War. Less than an estimated twenty percent of these were written from a Confederate perspective and many of those were Lost Cause screeds. Since the Confederacy lost, official documents were often destroyed which requires a historian to rely on sources like newspapers, letters, and memoirs—and these are not nearly as well organized and indexed as Union sources. This may partially account for why relatively few Confederate histories have been published.  

Dixie Betrayed is a solid history of the Confederacy and does not attempt to propagate the Lost Cause myths. Eicher explains how the South lost, but betrayal played no role in it. The absence of an industrial base, limited manpower, naive political leadership, and a flawed constitution were the culprits.

The betrayal theme likely originated from an editorial meeting aimed at boosting sales, and it may have been effective for the launch. However, now Eicher’s book wears the title like an albatross, and it is perhaps overlooked by those seeking an erudite history of the Confederate States of America.

To understand the Civil War period, it is necessary to study the war from both sides. Dixie Betrayed by Davis J. Eicher provides the view from the Confederate side.