Lincoln wanted to return the slaves to Africa I do believe. Any confirmation?
JFK wanted to get us out of Viet Nam after he got reelected. True?
He wanted them *OUT* and he didn't care where they were sent. He looked at Africa, and he looked at Central and South America. He even tried an experiment with locating a bunch of them in Central America, but the effort ended in disaster, with him having to send ships to rescue them and return them to America.
According to Union General Benjamin Butler, He and Lincoln discussed on the very day of Lincoln's assassination, a plan to use them to dig the Panama Canal.
He said Lincoln was delighted with the idea and agreed to discuss it further at a later time.
The consensus belief when Lincoln was a young man was that the country wouldn't be able to get rid of slavery without resettling the freed slaves in Africa or elsewhere outside the US. Lincoln went along with that belief, as did other Americans who had moral qualms about slavery. By 1865, he realized that African-Americans didn't want to be resettled. He also believed that those who were educated or who had fought in the war had earned the right to be citizens and vote. Resettlement efforts during the war had largely failed. It was also generally realized by 1865 that the South (and the country) wasn't going to get back on its feet without some Black participation in the labor force. Lincoln might favor continued attempts at voluntary resettlement of freedmen as a way of lessening the "racial problem," but he didn't favor involuntary deportations. Anyway, given what racial attitudes were in the 19th century, it isn't surprising that Americans who didn't like slavery were also in favor of resettlement efforts.
JFK wanted to get us out of Viet Nam after he got reelected. True?
My understanding was that he wanted some kind of a change. The bigger question is whether it would have lasted, or whether he'd put the troops he'd take out back in under another label. I don't think anybody can say for certain that Kennedy wanted to bring our involvement in Vietnam to a definitive and final end. Diem had just been overthrown. Kennedy approved (though maybe not of Diem's murder). Kennedy thought that might solve some problems and some US troops could be pulled out. Would he put them back in when it turned out that the coup had solved nothing? I think so.