New York Day-Book

City: New York

County: New York

State: New York

Founded in 1848, the New York Day-Book started as an anti-slavery newspaper. It published both daily and weekly editions for a time. When N. R. Stimson became editor, the paper became pro-slavery. John H. Van Evrie served as editor in the years leading up to the Civil War, and he amplified the paper's pro-slavery leanings, urging readers to support the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Scott v. Sandford, for instance, and claiming that Southerners had both a moral and constitutional right to extend slavery into the territories. He supported John C. Breckinridge in the 1860 Federal Election, and, although he denied ever supporting secession, Van Evrie opposed southern concessions to the North during the war. Under his leadership, the Day-Book became a well-known Copperhead publication during the war, meaning it was a Northern Democratic paper that espoused sympathy for the South while also claiming to be anti-war. This led the U.S. federal government to ban its use of the public mail system. The paper soon after lost the ability to support daily publication and renamed its weekly edition The Caucasian in an effort to publish the same arguments under a different name. Van Evrie continued as editor, and eventually the paper's subscriptions revived enough that Van Evrie resumed publication under the paper's original name.

Howard C. Perkins, “The Defense of Slavery in the Northern Press on the Eve of the Civil War,” The Journal of Southern History 9 (November 1943), 501-5; John S. Farmer, Americanisms—Old and New (London: Thomas Poulter & Sons, 1889), 169; Eugene H. Berwanger, "Negrophobia in Northern Proslavery and Antislavery Thought," Phylon 33 (1972), 269.