Editing Master race (section)

=== First occurrences ===
[[Benjamin W. Leigh]], representing [[Virginia]] in the [[United States Senate]], said in a speech of January 19, 1836:
<blockquote>There has been in Virginia as earnest a desire to abolish slavery as exists any where at this day. It commenced with the Revolution, and many of our ablest and most influential men were active in recommending it, and in devising plans for the accomplishment of it. The Legislature encouraged and facilitated emancipation by the owners, and many slaves were so emancipated. The leaning of the courts of justice was always ''in favorem libertatis''. This disposition continued until the impracticability of effecting a general emancipation, without incalculable mischief to the master race, and danger of utter destruction to the other, and the evils consequent on partial emancipations, became too obvious to the Legislature, and to the great majority of the people, to be longer disregarded.<ref>[http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ll/llrd/022/0100/01000191.tif Gales &amp; Seaton's Register, 1836, p. 191]</ref></blockquote>

The [[Oxford English Dictionary]] records that [[William J. Grayson]] used the phrase "master race" in his poem ''The Hireling and the Slave'' (1855):
<blockquote><poem>
For these great ends hath Heaven’s supreme command
Brought the black savage from his native land,
Trains for each purpose his barbarian mind,
By slavery tamed, enlightened, and refined;
Instructs him, from a master-race, to draw
Wise modes of polity and forms of law,
Imbues his soul with faith, his heart with love,
Shapes all his life by dictates from above
</poem></blockquote>

where the phrase denotes the relation between the white masters and negro slaves.

By 1860 Virginian author [[George Fitzhugh]] was using the "challenging phrase 'master race', which soon came to mean considerably more than the ordinary master-slave relationship".<ref>Wish, Harvey ''George Fitzhugh: propagandist of the Old South'' Louisiana State University Press (1943) p. 270</ref> Fitzhugh, along with a number of southern writers, used the term to differentiate Southerners from Northerners, based on the [[dichotomy]] that Southerners were supposedly descendants of [[Normans]] / [[Cavaliers]] whereas Northerners were descendants of [[Anglo-Saxons]] / [[Puritans]].<ref>see Watson jr, Ritchie Devon ''Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War'' Louisiana State University Press (2008)</ref>