As someone who spends a lot of time reading 19th Century American newspapers, I sometimes come up with a newspaper with the word “Caucasian” in its masthead title. The phrase, denoting white people, had a powerful enough appeal that it was used in the South, but also in the Midwest and New York.
Recently the scholarly journal Civil War History published a history by Jonathan Daniel Wells of New York’s Weekly Caucasian newspaper. According to Wells, the paper was getting started just as the Civil War was beginning. Newspapermen John Van Evrie and Rushmore Horton wanted to found a national paper that, according to their prospectus for investors, “stands firmly for WHITE SUPREMACY, and a defense of the rights and welfare of the Producing and Working Classes.” The term White Supremacy may seem to many today to be a modern word, but readers of publications of the 1860s and 1870s will find the term used with some frequency. Jonathan Daniel Wells writes that it was more popular during and after the Civil War than it ever was before the conflict.
On the top of the frontpage of their first issue, the two editors placed this quote from Stephen Douglas:
“I hold that this government was made on the WHITE BASIS, by WHITE MEN, for the benefit of WHITE MEN and THEIR POSTERITY FOREVER.”
The paper openly attacked the Lincoln administration, claiming that the president desired “the abolition of the supremacy of the white race over the Negro.” Van Evrie told his readers that “We are a nation of twenty-five millions of Caucasians, white men of pure, untainted admixture, and, largely fused with all of the branches or variations of the great master race of mankind.” While the paper was free to publish its racist views, when those opinions included opposition to the war effort, the paper sometimes lost its ability to mail copies to its many out-of-town subscribers.
As early as December, 1861 the Weekly Caucasian was predicting that Lincoln would end slavery. With abolition on the horizon, the paper warned, “the northern people must prepare themselves for supporting hordes of idle and vagabond negroes.” It also warned that Black equality would degrade white workers until bringing their “their manhood to a level with a subject race.” [Weekly Caucasian, Oct. 12, 1861]
According to Jonathan Daniel Wells, the newspaper use of the term “White Supremacy” grew after the Emancipation Proclamation to frighten readers with the prospect that their immediate skin color advantage might soon disappear.
Reference:
- Civil War History
- Volume 68, Number 1, March 2022
- Inventing White Supremacy
Race, Print Culture, and the Civil War Draft Riots
by Jonathan Daniel Wells - All newspaper quotes in my post come from Jonathan Wells’s excellent essay.
