After President Lincoln’s 1860 election victory, the end of slavery lay in wait, a latent threat for the Democratic party. Most of the Republican party saw no need for an immediate end to slavery and instead advocated for a gradual change. Lincoln noted in a debate with Stephen Douglas that the end of slavery would take “a hundred years at the least.” Yet, Democrats continued to insist Republicans wanted to abolish slavery then and now. 

One-off incidents turned to scapegoats in support of Southern secession. The raid at Harpers Ferry, led by abolitionist John Brown, threatened a cycle of repeat uprisings for Southern Democrats. The success of the Wide Awakes, a grassroots political movement based in Democratic strongholds across Northern states, was bad enough; even worse was when Black men began marching with the group in their processions and “confirmed the southern narrative of the coming Republican apocalypse.”

Democratic papers used scare tactics in their reporting of these one-off events. When Black men started showing up to Republican rallies, the Quincy Herald turned to writing blatantly racist, galvanizing headlines—”Another N-word in the Crowd.” They also reported on the event “where a white and black man “join[ed] hands” while holding a U.S. flag.” 

For Southern Democrats, though they likely knew the threat of abolitionism was not immediate, the Republican party’s rise to power was domineering. No longer would they be able to continue their tarnished legacy for ages to come. An immediate, strong response was necessary. What better way to facilitate it than spreading exaggerated stories?

We still see scare tactics like these used by politicians today. Take the first presidential debate for example. Somewhere along the way, Donald Trump starts employing a rather familiar scare tactic to the 1860 idea that Republicans were staunch sympathizers to immigrants or enslaved people—so much so, that it would be at the expense of white Americans. 

In reference to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Trump insists that these immigrants are eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. The lurking message behind this obvious xenophobic quote is that Kamala Harris and the Democrat party are supporting these so-called violent, Haitian immigrants. 

Both Trump and the Democrats of the South in 1860 centralized white fears in their arguments by exaggerating and caricaturing their opponents’ policies. 

 

Sources: 

Jon Grinspan. “‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign.” The Journal of American History 96, no. 2 (2009): 357–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622297.


Sally Heinzel. “‘To Protect the Rights of the White Race:’ Illinois Republican Racial Politics in the 1860 Campaign and the Twenty-Second General Assembly.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 108, no. 3–4 (2015): 374–406. https://doi.org/10.5406/jillistathistsoc.108.3-4.0374.