How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

There also is ample evidence that white Southerners who did not own enslaved people were often still deeply committed to preserving the institution. Historian James Oliver Horton writes about how the press inundated white Southerners with messages about why fighting to prevent the abolition of slavery was essential to preventing enslaved and formerly enslaved people from, in the words of the Louisville Daily Courier, rising “to the level of the white race.” Without slavery, these papers argued, there would be no difference between poor whites and free Blacks. The Louisville Daily Courier warned non-slaveholding white Southerners about the slippery slope of abolition and the dangers of racial equality: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper did not stop there, and went right to the issue it knew animated the most fervor and fear among white Southern men: would non-slaveholding white men accept a society in which they “AMALGAMATE TOGETHER THE TWO RACES IN VIOLATION OF GOD’S WILL”?