You conveniently forget the events which shaped changing opinion between 1858 and 1866. "White southerners" didn't feel blacks were human beings in 1858, 1866, or for decades afterward.
"... but [blacks] escaped colonization and expatriation only because Lincoln couldn't find the political will to put his ultimate plan into effect ..."
You were aware, were you not, that for a number of years before the war, Roger Taney was the vice president of the American Colonization Society?
"But who are you, Capitan, to judge those Southerners, at the comfortable distance of 140 years?"
Those who decline to establish objective moral values, or tolerate practices contrary to the laws of God and nature, are called "moral relativists." "All men are created equal" is considered a fundamental tenet of natural law and this country's political legacy. To the extent that southerners either denied the tenet itself, or rationalized that blacks were not human (and therefore did not apply), those who would today justify that conduct fit squarely into the category of moral relativist. Your post suggests that you are willing to tolerate, and apologize for, historic amoral conduct.
"Wait 'til you lose a war to people who hate you, before you go around telling everyone what you wouldn't do."
As you have read, I try to avoid "hate." But I fully understand your underlying motivation. And I have a reasonably good appreciation of the southern culture - having married a southerner, having ancestors who lived in the south and fought for the south, lived in the south and remained loyal, lived in the north and fought for the north (and others who did not arrive in this country until the 20th century), and having lived in Texas for a few years (if you want to consider Texas as "southern" - I would call it a distinctly different culture).
You were aware, were you not, that Abraham Lincoln was a brother member in good standing of the American Colonization Society and one of the eleven managers of the Illinois Colonization Society?
James Mitchell recruited Abraham Lincoln to help organize Illinois for the American Colonization Society. The Illinois State Register of August 30, 1853 said that the Hon. Abram Lincoln would speak that night on Colonization at the First Presbyterian Church. Lincoln gave another speech to the Colonization Society on January 4, 1855. Historian Eugene H. Berwanger says "Lincoln in 1857 urged the Illinois legislature to appropriate money for colonization in order to remove free Negroes from the state and prevant miscegenation." On February 27, 1860 at the Cooper Institute in New York, Lincoln said, "in the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttermany years ago, 'It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil well wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu filled up by free white laborers.'"
And Lincoln's political hero Henry Clay, whom he eulogized, was the President of the American Colonization Society.
I must disagree. Texas is very much Southern...Until you get west of San Antonio anyway.