Snopes: Yes! In 1858 Lincoln Believed In White Superiority (The Vility Of Decontextualization)

Abraham Lincoln
Wikiquotes
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

Snopes: Yes, Abraham Lincoln Did Express His Belief In White Superiority

http://www.snopes.com/did-lincoln-racism-equality-oppose/

Excerpt: During the Civil War, Columbia University Professor Eric Foner says, Lincoln’s views evolved radically as he was exposed to black people such as Frederick Douglass, who were far more talented than he had assumed, and as the efforts of freed slaves in the Union army earned them, in Lincoln’s view, the right to citizenship.

Just before his death, Lincoln gave a speech in which he mentioned the possibility of giving black Union soldiers and wealthy black elites the right to vote, in direct contradiction to his 1858 remarks. And yet, Foner told us, for a long time Lincoln’s plan for black people in the United States largely consisted of arranging for them to the leave the country and set up colonies elsewhere.

Foner also warned against overemphasizing the importance of ethnicity to Lincoln by isolating specific racist remarks he made:

The fact is, Lincoln said almost nothing about race. He was not that interested in race…Race was not a major intellectual construct for Lincoln…And the 1858 speech was purely defensive. That doesn’t excuse it, but he was being attacked in those debates as believing in negro equality. 

“Whereas abolition was a central aspect of Lincoln’s moral compass”, the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates wrote in 2009, “racial equality was not”:

…Lincoln despised slavery as an institution, an economic institution that discriminated against white men who couldn’t afford to own slaves and, thus, could not profit from the advantage in the marketplace that slaves provided. At the same time, however, he was deeply ambivalent about the status of black people vis-à-vis white people, having fundamental doubts about their innate intelligence and their capacity to fight nobly with guns against white men in the initial years of the Civil War.

Gates concluded:

[Lincoln] certainly embraced anti-black attitudes and phobias in his early years and throughout his debates with Douglas in the 1858 Senate race… By the end of the Civil War, Lincoln was on an upward arc, perhaps heading toward becoming the man he has since been mythologized as being: the Great Emancipator, the man who freed — and loved — the slaves. But his journey was certainly not complete on the day that he died. Abraham Lincoln wrestled with race until the end. 

Alan: American "conservatives" are not interested in any left-leaning truth that is fair, balanced and rigorously contextualized.

Rather, they are interested in brute political advantage that advances the cause of White-Nationalism-White-Supremacism no matter how much they mangle Truth and the proportionality Truth entails.

"Thomas Aquinas On American Conservatives' Continual Commission Of Sin"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/12/thomas-aquinas-on-american.html