Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The election of Lincoln, declared an Alabama newspaper, “shows that the North [intends] to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South.” “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?” a Georgia secessionist asked non-slaveholders. If Georgia remained in a Union “ruled by Lincoln and his crew . . . in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes.”21 “If you are tame enough to submit,” declaimed South Carolina’s Baptist clergyman James Furman, “Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” No! No! came an answering shout from Alabama. “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! . . . Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism.”