"Fake News, Dirty Tricks and Civil War Politics" Topic

"Today's political discourse includes frequent talk of "fake news" (a term which seems to only occasionally mean actual trickery rather than simply unfavorable reporting). Meanwhile, partisan political concerns sometimes seem thick with racial hostility, appealing to voters' irrational fears. None of this is new. During the Civil War a handful of efforts turned "fake news" into an art form and many partisan combatants proved shameless in appealing to white racism.

Near the close of 1863, as the two major parties were gearing up for the presidential election the following year, two journalists for the Democratic New York World concocted a bizarre and creative scheme. Shortly after the start of the new year, David Croly and George Wakeman anonymously published an ambitious 71-page pamphlet, entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White man and Negro. Pretending to be a complex scientific treatise, Miscegenation described an idealized future where Blacks and Whites would intermingle without limitations, including unrestrained sexual relations across racial lines.[1]

The clever journalists – who even coined the word "miscegenation" for posterity – played a complex game. They hoped to convince White readers that abolitionist Republicans supported the pamphlet's notions, even adding an Appendix with quotations from actual abolitionists, implying that those leaders had endorsed miscegenation. Binding their words directly to the upcoming election, Croly and Wakeman concluded that "whereas, the result of the last Presidential election [1860] has given the colored race on this continent its freedom, the next Presidential election should secure to every black man and woman the rest of their social and political rights." Thus, a vote for Abraham Lincoln would be a vote for pure racial equality and enfettered racial intermingling.[2] This rather brilliant piece of "fake news" attracted some attention in the national press and scored a huge victory for the forces of fraud when Ohio Democrat Sunset Cox – taken in by the fakery – delivered a speech before the House of Representatives denouncing the pamphlet…"

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Armand