In warning that Republicans favored racial “amalgamation,” Douglas adopted a common tactic among northern Democrats, who regularly insisted that people of European descent were superior to all others and that any move toward racial equality would lead inevitably to sex between Black men and white women, and therefore to pollution of the white race. Democratic politicians may have genuinely worried that this would come to pass, but such rhetoric was also a political tactic designed to scare voters into casting their lot with the Democrats. Douglas never altered his position, stated early on,
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