White slave propaganda

Publicity, including photographs, novels, and popular lectures, about light-skinned slaves, was used during and prior to the American Civil War to further the abolitionist cause and to raise money for the education of former slaves. This practice is sometimes called white slave propaganda. The images included light-skinned slave children photographed alongside dark-skinned adult slaves.

Sexual exploitation of slaves by their masters was common in the southern United States. Mixed-race slaves constituted about 10% of the 4 million slaves enumerated in the 1860 census. About 5% of slaves born in the Southern US are believed to have been fathered by white masters. An analysis of slave narratives shows that about one-third of women ex-slaves had a child with a white father, or had a white father themselves. The plight of these mixed-race slaves, especially of the children, was often publicized as a way to further the abolitionist cause.

The character of Eliza in the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a quadroon slave whose child also appeared to be "all-but-white". Carol Goodman states that these literary "white slaves" only existed in the imagination of the readers, whereas later photographs made the character real.

Nonfiction accounts written by escaped light-skinned slaves include those of Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (coauthored with her husband William) and Harriet Ann Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl The authors of these works often appeared on the abolitionist lecture circuit.

The Crafts and other abolitionists publicized the history of Salomé Müller, a German immigrant orphaned as an infant soon after arrival in New Orleans. Though Muller (later known as Sally Miller) was completely of European descent, she had been enslaved since infancy. The threat of white girls being seized and thrown into slavery prompted Parker Pillsbury to write to William Lloyd Garrison: "A white skin is no security whatsoever. I should no more dare to send white children out to play alone, especially at night... than I should dare send them into a forest of tigers and hyenas."

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