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States. But black voters were not among Lincoln’s constituents, and the extension of equal opportunities to them was not one of his principal concerns. Lincoln enjoyed the music and comedy of blackface minstrels. He told “darky” jokes. He was not above using Adams’s “opprobrious title” himself.⁷³ Inconsistency of opinion over a lifetime hardly makes someone a hypocrite. But these snapshots do suggest that racism and antislavery identities coexisted amicably in nineteenth-century white thought.

      Although the battle lines between proslavery and antislavery were clearly drawn, there were no corresponding camps gathering racists and antiracists.⁷⁴ Expressions of intolerance generally went unchallenged. Claims of white superiority provided the underpinning of a system that rewarded a few plantation plutocrats at the expense of their exploited labor force, but those same claims also soothed poor whites who received no other benefits from slavery. One significant difference between racism and slavery is that while racism was a straightforward proclamation of supposed biological superiority, advocacy of or opposition to slavery erupted from a wide variety of impulses.⁷⁵ Many Northern and Western farmers opposed slavery because they perceived (correctly) that the Slave Power monopolized the best farmland. Factory operatives often opposed abolition because they believed free black labor undercut their wages. Slavery offended some people only when they had to see it, or its most troublesome aspects. A revealing letter from Northern educator and reformer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody encouraging a young friend to take a job as a governess in a slaveholding Baltimore family described the situation in a way that suggested the young woman’s delicate sensibilities would not be compromised: “There never was a whipping while [the previous governess] was there. The severest punishment was shutting up in a closet in the entry and that happened but once or twice. [The slaves] are well clothed and fed and taken care of as children and in fact slavery is as much robbed of its evils as it can be possibly.”⁷⁶

      Many Republicans abhorred slavery more for causing economic backwardness than because of its cruelty or injustice.⁷⁷ Poor whites moved from the South to the Northwest to escape economically devastating competition with slave labor. By any measure, they were antislavery. But they were also racist, bringing with them not only Southern prejudices but also fears that free blacks might compete with them in the socially fluid milieu of the fast-developing West. By the 1850s, the Democratic and Republican parties sometimes appeared to be in a contest to demonstrate which more stridently championed white privilege at the expense of black equality.⁷⁸

      Slavery’s critics shared no common solution to the problem. Those who favored immediate abolition had little patience for those who favored gradual abolition, and still less with advocates of colonization.⁷⁹ While full-fledged abolitionists were not hated and vilified in the North to the same degree as in the South, they nevertheless inspired little admiration for most of the antebellum period. Although not always silenced, they were often ridiculed. Some Southerners regarded abolitionists as foolish but harmless. Maria Dubois of New Orleans, visiting her mother and sister in the canal town of Canastota, New York, spoke to participants at an abolition meeting in 1848: “one says it is true that when a slave gets to [sic] old or is otherwise disenabled that the Master kills him and sells his skin for shoe leather … it is very amusing to hear their ideas of slavery.”⁸⁰ Their reputation was not a great deal higher in the North. “The Liberator is the most unpopular paper in New England,” complained antislavery activist A. Sydney Southworth, who had charged himself with selling subscriptions. “The reason is obvious. The clergy are almost universally opposed to it, and of course the most of their people must follow them and do as they say, without inquiring whether they are right or wrong.”⁸¹

      The passion of abolitionists was generally received as unseemly enthusiasm, and they were associated with soiled collars, uncombed hair, and sexual irregularity. A matrimonial advertisement placed in the Water-Cure Journal in 1855 by a female devotee of hydrotherapy suggests how abolitionism was conflated with a number of unconventional interests: “[I] must be mated phrenologically and spiritually, or not at all. Should wish one who could do without tea, coffee, pork, beef, mutton, and feather-beds; a practical anti-slavery man, anti-tobacco, and I care not if anti-razor.”⁸² John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the utopian Oneida Community, probably did the abolitionist movement no favors when, in a pamphlet called Slavery and Marriage. A Dialogue, he equated the liberating possibilities of free love with antislavery. The dialogue concluded with a formerly equivocating participant deciding that if slavery is a monstrous abuse, it shares many characteristics with marriage: “I must either let Slavery alone, or go for a revolution of society at the north as well as the south.”⁸³

      Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that so many squelched impulses should find expression elsewhere. Americans of the early republic spent a great deal of energy trying to define the national character against foreign models and gauging what other nations might say or think about them. Through comparisons with other countries, the young United States defined itself.⁸⁴ England, the mother country of the colonies that ultimately became the United States, from which its inhabitants drew their language, their conception of freedom, and the basis of their law, was the major touchstone. France, England’s age-old enemy, which had followed the United States into the republican experiment, with less happy consequences as it lapsed into violent revolution, dictatorship, empire, and finally a reestablished monarchy, provided a powerful but very different kind of comparison. Federalists admired England, while Republicans—notably Thomas Jefferson—chose France as their beau ideal. The nation’s early political parties slandered one another by applying the most reviled characteristics of these respective countries to their opponents—thus Federalists reviled Republicans as dangerous Jacobins and Republicans condemned Federalists as would-be aristocrats.⁸⁵

      Just as they did with England and France, Americans tried to understand their identity and national character by considering themselves in relation to Latin America, a region with which they had essential commercial and diplomatic ties, whose territory they traversed in order to reach the Pacific, in which they fought a major war. During the thirty-five years before the Civil War, between the jubilee celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of U.S independence and the year the Union broke into pieces, people in the United States cast the nations of Latin America in a variety of roles. The countries to the south were promising disciples of republicanism following in the footsteps of the path-breaking United States; cautionary examples of democracy subject to foreign domination; lurid cultures in the thrall of Roman Catholicism; and fertile fields for mining, discovery, and conquest. Latin America was at once a destination and a gateway through which white America’s unwanted black and Native American populations would pass on their way out of a nation purged of its racial cast-offs.

      While Americans understood themselves in relation to other nations, foreign visitors—especially Europeans—were busy observing them, describing the new republic in travel accounts that were eagerly consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. These foreign visitors showed no reserve in analyzing the peculiar institution—increasingly peculiar as slavery was progressively shunned by the rest of the world.⁸⁶ Northerners suffered torments in the face of European excoriations. Southerners found themselves called upon to apologize for an institution branded backward and barbaric. Nationalists in the young republic were especially concerned with setting the United States apart from its European origins. They saw their country setting off on a grand and conspicuous experiment, but it was certainly not for slavery that they wanted to be exceptional. If, in the company of foreign visitors, Americans were reticent about human bondage, their motive is understandable enough: they instinctively recognized slavery not only as an issue that held the potential for tearing apart the new nation but also as a magnet for foreign censure: “foreigners heap [reproaches] upon our national character on account of the existence of this stain upon it,” brooded the North American Review in 1835.⁸⁷

      European travelers to the United States not infrequently observed that the self-proclaimed free society maintained a tight-lipped reserve about topics that might provoke controversy or depict the nation in a less-than-flattering light. “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America,” proclaimed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.⁸⁸ Similarly, Charles Dickens’s 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit,

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