Antiblack sentiment was a key component of the ideology of the Jacksonian movement. Democrats strongly opposed black suffrage, favored black-exclusion laws, and resisted granting additional civil liberties to free blacks. Democratic speeches and newspapers often resorted to racist demagoguery. In 1845, for example, the Ohio Statesman, the party's state organ, reacted to a proposal to allow blacks to testify against whites by asking its readers: "Are you ready to [be] placed on a level with 'the niggers' in the political rights for which your fathers contended? Are you ready to share with them your hearths and homes?" Following the same script, Democrats bitterly denounced the abolitionist movement and argued that slavery was strictly a state
