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4. “For the sake of your wives, children and their posterity”: Manly Politics
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96 Chapter 3 the Post is endorsed by the Globe, and the Globe is a Van Buren paper.The inference I think the reader is to draw is that to vote for Van Buren is to vote against slavery. This article goes on to condemn the Van Burenites for appealing to sectional prejudices (i.e., antislavery) in service of a unified region. As mentioned earlier,this accusation is not only incoherent—antislavery was such a marginal position in 1835 that unification on such a basis would have been impossible—it is also untrue; Van Buren was careful to espouse antiantislavery , if not actively proslavery, sentiments. However, the accusation was a good description of precisely what Green was trying to do in these various articles: inflaming sectional prejudices for purposes of his faction.14 Johnson was a controversial choice for vice president because of his openly treating his African American mistress (or possibly wife) Julia Chinn and their children as his family. On June 9, Green engaged in the kind of amalgamationist-baiting that would later typify pro-segregation rhetoric. The title of the article, “The Amalgamating Republican in Baltimore ,” refers, not to Johnson, but to a newspaper editor who had argued that Johnson’s family affairs were irrelevant. This piece of billingsgate is repeated June 27, when the editor suggests that the editor of the Georgetown Sentinel must be one of Johnson’s “mulatto sons,” and again in the June 30 “The Georgetown Sentinel—Col. R. M. Johnson.” The basis of Green’s objection to Johnson’s behavior is made clear in “A Sketch of the New Candidate for the Vice Presidency,” which begins: Richard M. Johnson is offered to the Northern Fanatics as a man after their own heart. Are they abolitionists? Are they AMALGAMATIONISTS ? What more would they have than a man whose life illustrates, whose practice carries out the maxims of their school? A man who has never had any wife but a negress? Who has reared up a family of mulatto children under his roof? Who has recognized their mother as the mistress of his household? Who has endeavored to force them into the highest circles of fashionable society?—Who has done,and is daily laboring to do,more than any other man,to realise the dangers which afford his Northern allies a pretext for meddling with our affairs? Johnson’s crime is not having sexual relations with an African American woman, nor with fathering “mulatto” children, but with his open acknowl- Alarmism, Conspiracy, and Unification 97 edgment of them, and his insistence on their being treated with respect. Even more explicit is “The Georgetown Sentinel—Col. R. M. Johnson” (June 30), when the editor says, “If Col. Johnson had the decency and the decorum to seek to hide his ignominy from the world, we should disdain to lift the curtain; but he seeks nothing of the kind. His chief sin against society was in the publicity and barefacedness of his conduct. He scorns all secrecy, all concealment, all disguise. He affects no squeamishness, no sensibility to public opinion.” The latter article also accuses the Georgetown Sentinel editor of wanting “a wife, who, like the offence of the King, in Hamlet, ‘is rank and smells to heaven.’”15 Just as Nazis accused all their critics of being Jews, and right-wing authoritarians accuse all their critics of being communist, so Green tries to smear his opponents with the amalgamationist term. What makes his use even stranger is that it would be a smear at all: there is something about a proslavery rhetor feigning outrage at race-mixing that must give a reader pause. Yet, that was what Green did. The majority of a column-long June 9 article on abolitionists is a reprint from a Baltimore paper. This excerpt is prefaced by two paragraphs, ending with the statement that the article “will no doubt be hailed at the North by the fanatics, as evidence of the rapid extension of liberal feelings at the South.” Another instance of the polarizing move, whether abolitionists would actually hail the original article is irrelevant; it, and its author , have now been placed on the side of abolitionists. Green found this a useful article; he reprinted portions of it the next day in “Questions. Moral, Physical, and Physiological.” The June 10 edition also has a fairly long article reprinted from the New York Courier and Enquirer, arguing that a recent antislavery article in the Edinburgh Review was...