. . . that articles have appeared in the Tribune “Showing, not that it is the duty of those who oppose negro Slavery to marry negroes but that it is a wise thing to do – that we thereby promote our own happiness and benefit our race.”
We beg the Times to rub its spectacles and look again. We never said nor thought that “it is a wise thing to do” aught with negroes but to do them justice, which does not, according to our ideas include marrying them. But this we do say – and we beg to be understood as insisting on it – that those whites who cultivate intimacies with colored women shall do so in accordance with law, divine and human, and not in defiance of it. We do not at all share in the taste which impels to intermarriage with Blacks; but we do not make our tastes the standard of other people’s actions or the measure of their rights. And if Whites will form such intimacies with Blacks, we commend them to example of that eminent democrat and slaveholder, Col. Richard M. Johnson, who always treated the mother of his children as his wife, although the laws of his State forbade his giving her a legal claim to the title, and in due time married his and her daughters to White Democrat and Kentuckians like himself. (Their tastes, mind you, is not ours.) Four years after he had done this, and in full view of all the facts, the Democrats of the intire [sic] Union nominated and elected him Vice President of the United States, without any of our help. Of the six hundred thousand of mixed breeds in this country, it is perfectly notorious that a large majority are presumptively of Democratic paternity, while next to none can claim any consanguinity with Republicans. We appeal to facts, to which any one who walks Broadway by daylight can testify, that the affected Democratic horror of Miscegenation is all of the cants of this canting age, the most notoriously impudent. –
N. Y. Tribune, 20th
– Published in The Union Sentinel, Osceola, Iowa, Saturday, April 9, 1864
We beg the Times to rub its spectacles and look again. We never said nor thought that “it is a wise thing to do” aught with negroes but to do them justice, which does not, according to our ideas include marrying them. But this we do say – and we beg to be understood as insisting on it – that those whites who cultivate intimacies with colored women shall do so in accordance with law, divine and human, and not in defiance of it. We do not at all share in the taste which impels to intermarriage with Blacks; but we do not make our tastes the standard of other people’s actions or the measure of their rights. And if Whites will form such intimacies with Blacks, we commend them to example of that eminent democrat and slaveholder, Col. Richard M. Johnson, who always treated the mother of his children as his wife, although the laws of his State forbade his giving her a legal claim to the title, and in due time married his and her daughters to White Democrat and Kentuckians like himself. (Their tastes, mind you, is not ours.) Four years after he had done this, and in full view of all the facts, the Democrats of the intire [sic] Union nominated and elected him Vice President of the United States, without any of our help. Of the six hundred thousand of mixed breeds in this country, it is perfectly notorious that a large majority are presumptively of Democratic paternity, while next to none can claim any consanguinity with Republicans. We appeal to facts, to which any one who walks Broadway by daylight can testify, that the affected Democratic horror of Miscegenation is all of the cants of this canting age, the most notoriously impudent. –
N. Y. Tribune, 20th
– Published in The Union Sentinel, Osceola, Iowa, Saturday, April 9, 1864
