Business of Bigotry

Amid nineteenth-century America’s fierce battles over slavery and freedom, few proslavery partisans argued more vehemently for the supremacy of the white race than John Van Evrie (1814–96). A New York–based propagandist, writer, book publisher, and editor of the New York Day Book, Van Evrie leveraged the era’s rapidly expanding media and communications landscape to advance his cause. Throughout his career, he promoted pseudoscientific justifications for racism, proclaimed slavery as beneficial to society, and created a media network criticizing abolitionists, Republicans, and Democrats alike. Despite the Civil War’s defeat of Van Evrie’s cause, his success in cultivating an audience and market for his views allowed him to continue publishing during Reconstruction, rallying support among white readers for policies and practices that would continue to subordinate Black Americans.

Tracing Van Evrie’s failures and chilling successes over a career of some forty years, Michael E. Woods reveals the stunning resilience of racist ideology before and after the Civil War. In doing so, Woods demonstrates how the era’s print media, business systems, and political alliances allowed ideas like Van Evrie’s to flourish, even as Reconstruction promised a new birth of freedom for Americans of all races.