Quote:
Originally Posted by bungalow
He was a politician, it was a political decision. Lincoln needed popular support for the war and so he gave it a moral impetus. He was just as much a racist and believer that blacks were an inferior race as anyone else at the time.
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Only a racist by our standards. By the standards of his time, such as those of Stephen Douglas in the 1858 debates on slavery, he was actually one of the more enlightened. What must be remembered is that the idea of different races living amongst each other in a state of equality was an unknown concept. His use of racial slurs and confusion as to how to carry out Reconstruction are the failure of 19th Century Society, not just him.