John H. Van Evrie
[30] "[T]he existence of an inferior race" in the United States, he wrote, ...resulted in the creation of a new political and social order, and relieved the producing class from that abject dependence on capital which in Europe, and especially in England, renders them mere beasts of burden to a fraction of their brethren.
[19] Nonetheless, Van Evrie did not believe that slavery would expand into Kansas, Nebraska, or the region north of the Ohio River, as these areas possessed climates "utterly uncongenial to the Negro constitution."
[37] He considered anti-slavery sentiment to be a delusion derived from "European aristocrats who by holding up the imaginary wrongs to American slaves diverted attention from their own mistreatment of the white working class.
"[38] He thought that abolition of slavery would result in black people being forced into unfair competition with whites, and that such an experiment would lead to the collapse of American democracy.
"[38] He predicted that American ideas of equality would topple European despotisms, and condemned the oppression of the white working class by capitalists and their political allies in the northern United States.
[5] He feared that American civilization, which was defined by its adherence to the "natural" distinctions of race and not an artificial class hierarchy, was under threat not only from northern capitalists but also abolitionism, which he believed to be a monarchist plot originating in England.
[45] Fredrickson interpreted Van Evrie's Jacksonian rhetoric as being "calculated to appeal to socially insecure whites in search of a compensatory foundation for personal pride and status ...
"[46] He believed that white immigrants to the United States had distinctive physiognomical features (for example "The coarse skin, big hands and feet, the broad teeth, pug nose etc.
Black people, though, were bound in Van Evrie's view to remain "as absolutely and specifically unlike the American as when the race first touched the soil and first breathed the air of the New World.
[50] He held that "Mulattoism is an abnormalism—a disease" that left multiracial people "mercifully doomed to final extinction",[51] and believed miscegenation to be "the most loathsome and most hideous of social miseries.
"[40] Mixed people, he believed, were responsible for almost all crime and racial disorder[40] and suffered a "diminishing vitality" and a "tendency to disease and disorganization",[52] which Van Evrie called "muleism".
Wood notes that Van Evrie was among a number of critics who did not think "it important to explain how race mixing reduced the offspring to the lowest common denominator on the one hand and raised the mulatto to a level approaching the white man's on the other.
[59] In 1983, literary critic Eric Sundquist wrote that Van Evrie had "anticipated ... the hysterical defense of southern womanhood that would become and remain the touchstone of white racism".
[60] Though Van Evrie was closely allied with the Democratic Party,[19] during the Civil War he criticized his fellow Copperheads for their perceived failure to offer alternative political principles.
Van Evrie edited the newspaper in the 1850s and early 1860s, in which time he gave his backing to John C. Breckinridge in the 1860 presidential election, supported the policies of President James Buchanan in its immediate aftermath, opposed the Crittenden Compromise and urged adherence to Dred Scott v.
[65] In 1856 the Day Book reached the attention of future President Abraham Lincoln, whose notes for a speech showed he intended to read out and ridicule a clipping from the newspaper.
[63] The Day Book opposed all efforts to improve the conditions of black people and sought "the utter rout, overthrow and extermination of Abolitionism from American soil."
[45] It stirred up tensions among Irish Americans by claiming that the Republican Party would pursue policies benefitting black people at the expense of white immigrants.
Wood described the Day Book as "New York City's rabid racist newspaper" and wrote that it "made the arousal of its excitable Irish readers almost an editorial policy."
[7][5] With its publication Van Evrie hoped to incite "The White Men of America", especially those of the working class, to resist any alteration to the racial status quo.
[44][64] Van Evrie argued that the pamphlet had made a "profound impression" due to the "novelty" of its demonstration that truths about race had been "thrust out of sight by the mental dictation of the enemies of American institutions.
[82] In this text he argued that the transformation of slaves into citizens had dire implications for both the white race and the United States as a nation, as it would lead to racial conflict resembling that seen in the Haitian Revolution.
[10] Van Evrie also sought to capitalize on white opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted civil rights to black people.
[84] Van Evrie cites craniometry, physical anthropology, comparative anatomy and biological determinism in support of his argument that slaves were absolutely dependent on their masters.
[85] The book also features several chapters detailing alleged similarities between black people and animals,[86] and a preface in which Van Evrie lamented that Northerners "now rule the South by military force ... and are striving to 'reconstruct' American society on a Mongrel basis" (see Reconstruction Era).
[88] In 1860 Van Evrie published a pamphlet edition of the Dred Scott decision,[89] with a preface contending that the Supreme Court had found that the Declaration of Independence applied only to white people, and thus that it had "fixed the status of the subordinate race forever.
[90] The Old Guard, a Monthly Journal Dedicated to the Principles of 1776 and 1787, edited by Charles Chauncey Burr, was published by Van Evrie, Horton & Company starting in 1862.
[4] In 1868, Van Evrie's Democratic Alamanac devoted 20 pages to reprinting Bryan Edwards's narrative of the Haitian Revolution in an attempt to prove that the same "means and agencies" that had fomented the rebellion in Haiti were at work in the Republican Party.
In The Leopard's Spots, his 1960 book on 19th-century scientific racism, the historian William Stanton described Van Evrie as one "whom appeared only on the periphery of the controversy to comment, cheer, or make impolite noises of disapproval" and wrote that he "did not influence the tide of [the] battle" over polygenism and monogenism.
[102] In 1998, historian Matthew Frye Jacobson wrote that Van Evrie's "contribution to the scientific discourse of race involved not substance but simply volume.
