Have we no interest in the free Territories of the United States — that they should be kept open for the homes of free white people? As our Northern States are growing more and more in wealth and population, we are continually in want of an outlet, through which it may pass out to enrich our country. In this we have an interest — a deep and abiding interest. There is another thing, and that is the mature knowledge we have — the greatest interest of all. It is the doctrine, that the people are to be driven from the maxims of our free Government, that despises the spirit which for eighty years has celebrated the anniversary of our national independence.
We are a great empire. We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity.
Speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, August 27, 1856
hogwash...he still saw us as a republic..that was being eaten away by slavery...which was expanding at that time.
Well if’n it ain’t my favorite Johnny Reb! How ya doin’ cousin, how was your holidays?
“Lincoln view the USA as an empire not a republic.”
That is a completely false claim. “We are a great empire” was a factual statement about the Republic having overall sovereignty over vast domains of states, territories, and possessions. Historically the Athenian republic was also characterized as a great empire despite having no monarchial rulers at the time. Lincoln was using the word in that context as was allowed for in the dictionaries of his era.
Empires are typically assumed to be monarchial in nature because there were so few Republics in his preceding history and fewer still that were Republics having no monarch as its soverign ruler. The United States was the notable exception which Lincoln was recognizing in his statement about the exceptionalism of the United States of America.
“He also wanted to keep the territories for ‘free white men’.”
No, that is not the meaning of what Lincoln had to say, because you are misreading it. The quoatation, “they should be kept open for the homes of free white people,” was a phrase meant to indicate the new state or states should not have their land taken up by pro-slavery plantations and owners who would use their greater access to large amounts of debt capital based upon slave labor to deny these lands to the free white farmers who lacked the fiscal advantages associated with slavery. Free non-white farmers, ranchers, and others were already taking advantage of the freedoms available in the territories of the West unavailable in the Eastern states, so the phrasing could not have excluded what was already present.