You are correct that it is different in tone from what he often said in public --- he was a politician after all. In an age when it was not at all popular or even healthy in many parts of the country to express any sympathy for blacks or Catholics or any other minority, Lincoln chose his public words carefully and often did not express his true feelings. Around the same time Lincoln wrote this, an abolitionist newspaper editor was lynched by a pro-slavery mob in Alton Illinois.
|Here is a link to the entire text of the letter. Letter to Joshua Speed It is very good insight to the arguments and issues of the day.
Also, see my quote from those collected works in my other post to you. What are we to make of such incongruencies? there are many incongruencies in quotations from both sides. To me, Robert E. Lee is one of the least complex, most understandable of the characters, and I admire him more the more I learn of him. But surely such complexity in the documents of the time can't lead us to the story the public indoctrination camps tried to teach us when I was a kid that the North was a bunch of abolitionists who were motivated by a deep compassion for the slaves, and the South were a bunch of Nazi-style racists and drunks ready for a fight, because they knew in their hearts that being mean to Blacks (which is what they lived for) was wrong. It's just silly, and wrong, and still the basic line taught in the taxpayer-funded indoctrination camps.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that that simplistic, bigoted interpretation of the conflict is true. Let's say Lee and Davis were scoundrels, and Lincoln was the honest, loving, compassionate, courageous leader the textbooks make him out to be. Let's say it was ALL about slavery, and the South's love of slavery.
Does that mean that the political outcome of the victory of the North was a GOOD thing for our nation? Are some of us wrong to say that a lot of the lack of respect for the Constitutuion, the current moral and intellectual plight of the Blacks in the US, and the out-of-control nature of the Federal government can be traced back to this conflict and its outcome? What about all that? We engage in endless argument about the causes, and the motives, and the contradictory quotes...but what about the OUTCOME? Are we better off? Are the Blacks better off? I think arguing about that will bring out how differing in a worldview are the cultural Yankees and cultural Southerners/Westerners. It's a difference that goes back to the nation's conception. It is the reason why a socialist Yankee to this day cannot win votes in the South, and all our liberal presidents could only win elections if they came from the South and pretended to be slighlty conservative, and fed off of regionalism.
I'm through rambling now...