Few Americans of the Civil War generation doubted that the 1864 presidential campaign—often called the most important election in history—would ultimately boil down to the incendiary issue of race, at least in the tinderbox of New York City. In the metropolis where a draft riot had escalated into a race riot just one year earlier, the pro-Democratic, anti-emancipation newspaper the New York World produced several pieces of provocative evidence to testify to this ugly race-based strategy for defeating Lincoln and the Republicans and hopefully overturning his 1863 proclamation.
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