Of course. Which doesn't nullify the point previously proven, which was that Lincoln's policy, until the end of the war and his death, inclined toward the common view that blacks, howbeit that they were human, were not members in good standing of North American European society, and that therefore a new place in the world had to be found for them. Which wasn't the United States.
I diverge somewhat from the other Southerners on this board in arguing that Lincoln was always an emancipator and abolitionist, from 1855, when he wrestled with the irreconcilable objectives of upholding the Constitution and effecting the abolition of slavery, to the end of his life.
His motive, however, appears to have been to remove the onus of hypocrisy from American professions of love of liberty. So he said in his letters (as recounted by David Donald in his 1999 biography, Lincoln), and having read them from a time when he was out of office and temporarily without immediate ambition, I took him at his word.
That didn't necessarily extend to making blacks into full members of American society, with full rights and the franchise.
And the prewar maneuvering around the Corwin amendment was, IMHO, a dumbshow put on by Lincoln, to satisfy public opinion (however much of it was still listening and openminded) that he had attempted compromise -- without any intention of compromising -- and setting the scene for the eventual outbreak of hostilities, for which he was determined to thrust the moral onus on the South, in order to bring Northern opinion to embrace war.
And from a legal standpoint, he also needed hostilities and shots fired, in order to justify crushing the South militarily, which IMHO was his actual policy, never admitted publicly, after 1856. His solution to his moral impasse in 1855 was to get an abolitionist national administration elected, precipitate war, and crush the South behind the aegis of "defending the Constitution and American liberty". He killed a lot of people to make this happen, and I lay these dead at his door. War was his policy, and he must bear the blame for instigating it -- and Davis and the Southerners must bear the blame for having played into his hands, for having given Lincoln his war, and having ruined the South by misplaying their hand.
The fact is, however, that Lincoln did work to pass the real 13th Amendment, which didn't only end slavery in the rebelling states but in the loyal border states as well.
Of course. The eventual 13th Amendment was, again IMHO, his real policy. That was the goal, from 1856 forward, of the Republican Party.
And if you're going to argue, as some have, that Lincoln only worked to pass that amendment because it had become politically impossible not to only proves that, even if it hadn't been at the beginning, by 1864 the war was seen in the north to be about slavery, among other things.
No, he wanted the amendment for itself -- I think it was his Holy Grail. And the propaganda to change the purpose and meaning of the war in Northern opinion was Lincoln's. Exhibit "A" is the Gettysburg Address, which he was only willing to articulate in 1863. He didn't deliver it after Antietam, for example, or when the Emancipation Proclamation was promulgated -- deliberately, IMHO, because he gauged that public opinion was not ready. After Gettysburg, after a huge Union victory on Northern soil, public opinion was ready, and he gave it to them -- and in two minutes overthrew the United States Constitution and the American Experiment.