New book sheds new light on Lincoln's racial views McLEAN, Va. – Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has inspired Americans for generations, but consider his jarring remarks in 1862 to a White House audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America. "For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people," Lincoln said, promoting his idea of colonization: resettling blacks in foreign countries on the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist in the same nation. Lincoln went on to say that free blacks who envisioned a permanent life in the United States were being "selfish" and he promoted Central America as an ideal location "especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land — thus being suited to your physical condition." As the nation celebrates the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's first inauguration Friday, a new book by a researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax makes the case that Lincoln was even more committed to colonizing blacks than previously known. The book, "Colonization After Emancipation," is based in part on newly uncovered documents that authors Philip Magness and Sebastian Page found at the British National Archives outside London and in the U.S. National Archives. In an interview, Magness said he thinks the documents he uncovered reveal Lincoln's complexity. "It makes his life more interesting, his racial legacy more controversial," said Magness, who is also an adjuct professor at American University. Lincoln's views about colonization are well known among historians, even if they don't make it into most schoolbooks. Lincoln even referred to colonization in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, his September 1862 warning to the South that he would free all slaves in Southern territory if the rebellion continued. Unlike some others, Lincoln always promoted a voluntary colonization, rather than forcing blacks to leave.
Lincoln's views on race were even more nuanced than the article suggests. Stopping the spread of slavery into the western territories is the platform he ran on in 1860 and, of course, his victory was the final straw for slaveholding states. When the union split, his initial concern was to rejoin it with or without ending slavery. As either a change of heart or shift in strategy, maybe both, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Going into his second term and the Reconstruction era, Lincoln did not advocate for colonization and it's questionable how viable a solution he ever believed it to be in the first place.
damn you beat me to it. I was just about to thread this myself. Alot of people are seeing he wasnt so much a man of G-ds principles after all. the conservatives is hating this rite now. they are probably saying it is a the left leaning propaganda machine trying to destroy the fabric of america.
Tell you one thing, given the time period and the system that existed, Lincoln was much more palatable than the alternative. I wouldn't expect him to be John Brown, the noted abolitionist, but all said and done I will still give a big thank you to Lincoln for leading the Union to kicking the rebels asses. While we can always debate about Lincoln's true feelings, we beyond the shadow of a doubt knew what the Southern secessionists were all about and it certainly wasn't freeing blacks or creating black colonies. It was the continual extraction of every last ounce of energy out of black slaves as nothing but beasts of burden, for profit for their Antebellum society.
