Franklin County's papers spent more ink--almost all of it negative--on its nearly two thousand free blacks than Augusta did on its five thousand enslaved people.

The Valley Spirit, Franklin's Democratic paper, considered blacks better off in slavery than in the North. The paper regularly ran stories of blacks in the South who reenslaved themselves rather than remain freed and lascivious reports of white women eloping with black men. The Democratic paper was also deeply concerned about the presence of black voters in the North, reporting on the Ohio elections in November 1860 that the black vote carried the day for Lincoln and that 14,000 blacks voted in Ohio despite constitutional bars. The paper concluded that "Ohio is thus ruled not by white men, but by negroes." In Pennsylvania, the Democrats estimated that blacks made $15,000 in financial contributions to the Republicans for Lincoln's election--"it must have been funny," the Valley Spirit editors sneered, "to see Forney . . . soliciting money from the niggers for the Republican cause."

Republicans considered such jabs a ridiculous joke. They pointed out that the Whigs disenfranchised blacks in Pennsylvania and they did so because blacks generally voted Democratic. The editors barely used the word "black" in 1859-1860 in their papers. When they did, it was to ridicule whites with a story of black soldiers who did not know their right from their left foot or to relate the misadventures of an African visitor in Baltimore. The Republican paper featured stories of the virtues of black resettlement to Liberia and the travesties of local black crime.

Chambersburg Valley Spirit, A White Heiress Elopes with a Negro, January 19, 1859

Chambersburg Valley Spirit, A Row, February 16, 1859

Chambersburg Valley Spirit, How Our Negroes Live, March 30, 1859

Chambersburg Valley Spirit, A Good Idea, April 20, 1859

Chambersburg Valley Spirit, Court Week, April 20, 1859

Franklin Repository, The Bark James W. Page, September 14, 1859

Franklin Repository, A Native African, February 22, 1860

Valley Spirit, The Negro Government of the Black Republicans--Ohio Election, November 7, 1860

Related Historiography

Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

J. Morgan Kousser, "The Irrepressible Repressible Conflict,"Reviews in American History 21 (1993): 207-212.

John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998).