So, in your opinion, was Lincoln a principled liar or just an ideological whore?
That is from 1864, after he became a race pimp.
Earlier, he said other things.
Negro equality. Fudge! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this? (1859)(The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, Rutgers University Press, 1953, September 1859 (Vol. III p. 399))
I am deciding whether you are a knave vending or a fool gulping.
You seem like a fool gulping.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., has also addressed this Lincoln apology.
One reads everywhere or almost everywhere that Lincoln had to talk like a racist and vote like a racist because of the racist atmosphere of the time. This apology overlooks the relatively large number of white politicians who acted and voted for freedom despite racism.
In Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens, the future leader of the wartime House of Representatives, singlehandedly defeated an attempt to bar Black immigration and refused to sign a constitution that limited voting to White males (Woodley, 108-12).
In Massachusetts, in 1849, Charles Sumner inaugurated the century-long public school struggle, arguing in Roberts vs the City of Boston against segregated schools.
In New York, Senator Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, spoke out for Negro suffrage.
Will someone say that these men lived in the liberal East and that they didn't face the problems White politicians faced in the Midwest? What then are we to say about the great Ohio trio -- future senator and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, future Senator Benjamin Wade, and Congressmen Joshua Giddings -- and their brilliant campaigns in the 1840s and 1850s for Negro suffrage and repeal of the Black Laws that Lincoln supported in Illinois. In 1845, Chase called for equal suffrage and denounced "the whole policy of our legislature in relation to the colored population." Four years later, in 1849, the year Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed an anti-slave trade resolution, Chase drafted a bill to repeal Ohio's Black Laws.
Nor was he alone.
In Michigan, Civil War Governor Austin Blair backed Negro suffrage. In the same state, DeWitt Leach, a future congressman, supported Negro suffrage at the constitutional convention of 1850.
Indiana and Illinois were in a dead heat in the contest for the worst Northern state, but three delegates who later became congressmen, Schuyler Colfax, William Dunn, and David Kilgore, opposed Negro exclusion at the Indiana constitutional convention of 1850, and another future congressman, George W. Julian, led the fight against Black Laws.
There was even some action in Illinois where John M. Palmer, Jesse O. Norton, James Knox and even Lincoln's conservative friends, David Davis and James Matheny, opposed the Negro Exclusion Act at the constitutional convention of 1847.
Year by year, while Lincoln remained silent, deprecating their efforts, sensitive Illinois representatives presented petitions calling for integrated schools, repeal of the Black Laws, and an end to taxation without representation.
With the election of the first abolitionist state representative, Owen Lovejoy, brother of the martyred Elijah Parish Lovejoy, "a new sound," Edward Magdol said, "was heard in the House" and "a new spirit breathed into the language and precepts of Jefferson and Paine," a new spirit, one might add, that was never heard in the legislature in Lincoln's day and was certainly never heard from Abraham Lincoln (121).
Elected in 1854, Lovejoy lost no time in raising the banner of freedom, introducing a bill to repeal the Black Laws that denied Blacks the right to testify in courts. The bill was tabled, but Lovejoy, undaunted, continued to raise the issue, and people came from all over on February 6, 1855, one month after Lincoln called for the colonization of Blacks, to hear him make the first abolitionist speech in the Illinois General Assembly in support of three resolutions that would have instructed Illinois representatives and senators in Congress to oppose the extension of slavery and to vote for a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. Lovejoy said the new Republican Party had opened a new era in American life. It "had stepped forth like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, full grown, and fully equipped for the battle, and has already indeed gained no inconsiderable victories."
Lovejoy went on to say that the Fugitive Slave Law, which Lincoln supported, was degrading to all Americans and that he, an elected official of the state of Illinois, would not obey that law, even if it cost him imprisonment or death.
When Lovejoy finished, there was resounding applause, and some people cried. A boundary of sorts had been crossed in the state of Illinois, and the Springfield correspondent of the Chicago Tribune wrote: "This has been a great day for the state and the cause of Humanity. For the first time in the history of Illinois, a regular Abolitionist, in his place in the Hall of the House of Representatives, has made a speech in defense of his principles, and hundreds of persons heard for the first time, the enunciation of such principles from one whose history and character are a guaranty that he would nothing extenuate." People said later that "Lovejoy ... made the greatest speech ever made in the State House... " (Magdol 121-6, italics added).
One would have expected someone to say that about one of Lincoln's speeches to the legislature if the Abraham Lincoln of mythology had been real and if he had lived in Illinois in those days.
But, unhappily, there was no Abraham Lincoln in Illinois in Abraham Lincoln's time.
Forced into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., pp. 198-201.