Was Lincoln a Racist?

Abraham Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves for humanitarian reasons; only once slavery became dangerous to his agenda, did he free them. He and the Republican Party did not consider the slaves or free black men equals with the white race. Lincoln freed the slaves to support central government—to preserve the Union—and to protect “white rights.”

If Lincoln’s real goal for the War Between the States was to simply free the slaves because “all men were created equal,” he sure did not make that clear before or during his presidency. On March 4, 1861, during his First Inaugural Address he said, “I have no purpose; directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”¹

It is true that the president of the Executive Branch of the federal government had no right to make any such law to abolish slavery. The right to alter or change the laws of slavery would lie in the hands of Congress. The important thing to take away from his First Inaugural Address is that he had “no inclination to do so.”

Lincoln went further to demonstrate this point when he wrote a letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, on August 22, 1862, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”²

Saving the Union was his utmost goal of the Republican Party with the invasion of the South. If the strong central government was to survive, the South could not be allowed to leave the growing Hamiltonian empire. Their revenues would go with them when they departed the Union. In order for the “American System” to grow (a mercantilism system designed to build up the central government through corporate welfare supported by special interest groups), Lincoln and his supporters could not allow this to happen.

Political ideals on the form of government would divide the nation, not whether or not the slaves should be free or if the black race should be equals with the white race. The land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War would escalate this division between men who supported central government over those who supported limited government. On October 16, 1854, Lincoln said, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [new] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.”³

The new territories were to be for “free white people,” not a land for “free people” of any race or gender. The opposition toward the expansion of slavery was motivated by racism as well. United States Senator from Illinois, Lyman Trumball, also echoed the racial motivations to protect the new territories for the white laborer when he said, “we, the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.”⁴ Lincoln was very clear on his sentiments of racial equality or inequality during his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 in Ottawa, Illinois:

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.⁵

Except for the abolitionists—a minority group that made up about two percent of the American population—many agreed with Lincoln in that they were not “in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”⁶ Northern attitudes towards the black race in the antebellum period were shameful. The treatment of free blacks in the Northern states sounds very much like that of African American treatment in the South just prior to the Civil Rights movement in the twentieth century.  

In virtually every phase of existence [in the North], Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats or assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections; they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and resorts, except as servants; they prayed din “Negro pews” in the white churches, and if partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, they waited until the whites had been served the bread and wine. Moreover they were often educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries…racial prejudice haunts its victim wherever he goes.⁷

Lincoln and the Republican Party did not believe that the African race were “created equal” like the Declaration of Independence stated. Lerone Bennett, Jr., editor of Ebony magazine would agree when he wrote, “On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860, Lincoln said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the White race. In Galesburg, he referred to ‘the inferior races.’ Who were ‘the inferior races’? African Americans, he said, Mexicans, who he called ‘mongrells,’ and probably all colored people.”⁸

The same man who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation would also say on the topic of emancipation, “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this….We cannot, then, make them equals.”⁹ Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure to assure victory over the South and to force them back into his empire. With Northern reconstruction in the South after the war, they would bring with them the same oppressive and segregated policies that the North had been practicing before the conflict. The slaves were now free to enjoy Northern segregation and the indentured servitude of crop sharing.

Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party had saved the “Union” or empire, by freeing all the slaves. The South was returned with all her tax payers, which would bring balance back to the central government’s might and would support their American System once again.   

Notes

1.       Lincoln, Abraham. The Avalon Project: Documents in Lay, Histoy and Diplomacy. First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. 2008. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp (accessed November 12, 2013).

2.       Crocker III, H. W. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War." 6-7. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008.

3.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 11. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

4.       Crocker III, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, p. 10.

5.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 11.

6.       Ibid, p. 24.

7.       Ibid, p. 25.

8.       Jr., Lerone Bennett. "Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream." 132. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000.

9.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p.12.