Miscegenation comes from the Latin miscere , 'to mix' and genus , 'kind'. The pamphlet was a hoax, concocted by Democrats to discredit the Republicans by imputing to them what were then radical views that would offend the vast majority of whites, even those who opposed slavery.
The issue of miscegenation, raised by the opponents of Abraham Lincoln , featured prominently in the election campaign of In his fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas , Lincoln took great care to emphasize that he supported the law of Illinois which forbade "the marrying of white people with negroes". The pamphlet and variations on it were reprinted widely in both the North and South by Democrats and Confederates.
Only in November , after Lincoln had won the election, was the pamphlet exposed in the United States as a hoax. By then, the word miscegenation had entered the common language of the day as a popular buzzword in political and social discourse. Before the publication of Miscegenation , the words racial intermixing and amalgamation were used as general terms for ethnic and racial genetic mixing.
Contemporary usage of the amalgamation metaphor, borrowed from metallurgy , was that of Ralph Waldo Emerson 's private vision in of America as an ethnic and racial smelting-pot, a variation on the concept of the melting pot. The term miscegenation was coined to refer specifically to the intermarriage of blacks and whites, with the intent of galvanizing opposition to the war. In Spanish America , the term mestizaje , which is derived from mestizo , a term used to describe a person who is the offspring of an Indigenous American and a European.
The primary reason why there are so few indigenous peoples of Central and South America remaining is because of the persistent and pervasive miscegenation between the Iberian colonists and the indigenous American population, which is the most common admixture of ethnicities found in the genetic tests of present-day Latinos.
