Frank Blair was a leading member of the prominent Blair Family. Before the war he was a Free-Soil Democrat. During the war he was a Republican. In 1868 he was the Democratic nominee for Vice President. On August 1, 1865 he wrote a letter advising President Andrew Johnson on Reconstruction. Here is an excerpt which gives you a sense of the thinking of a conservative Unionist. When Blair warns against “amalgamation” he is voicing concern that blacks and whites will intermarry and have mixed-race children.
Negro suffrage shouts out on one side with a political aspect and on the other we have the social aspect to emerge in the shape of amalgamation. What can come of this adulteration of our Anglo-Saxon race and Anglo-Saxon Government by Africanization, but the degradation of the free spirit & lofty aspirations which our race inherited from their ancestry and brought to this continent; and turn that whole portion of it engaged as manual Operatives into that class of mongrels which cannot but spring from the unnatural blending of the blacks & whites in one common class of laborers and giving to both an assimilation through that color, which has unhappily marked servitude during all generations from the days of Ham. The result would inevitably be to make a distinction in caste and put a brand on all our race associated in employment with people of color & crisped hair. It would not create equality between those thus associated and those engaged in professional & political pursuits. It would hasten the creation of a lower order—a serfdom—a foundation for an Aristocracy crowned with Royalty.
From: Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (The Library of America) (Kindle Locations 1337-1342). Library of America. Kindle Edition.
