Racism within the Burleigh Family

The Burleigh family members were white people of their time. While they were actively fighting against anti-Black racism, they were not immune to racist discourses around them. This emerges most glaringly in relation to Native peoples. 

The most blatant examples of this racism emerge in relation to the presidential campaign on 1856, featuring John C. Fremont, the noted explorer of the west. He was also an agent of native land dispossession and a key figure in what scholars call the California Genocide of native peoples in the 1840s and 1850s. The 'heroic' dimensions of his story formed part of the backbone of his campaign. Both William and George wrote poems in which they abandoned their former pacifist principles (to awkward effect within their own poetic techniques), and gave precedence to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. This is most glaring in George S. Burleigh's collection "Signal Fires on the Trail of the Pathfinder."