Ya tthink?
This Lincoln, the one everybody tries to hide, was also a consummate opportunist. Not only was he a trimmer, but he was, Leonard Swett said, "such a trimmer the world has never seen."
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 74 citing Herndon's Informants, edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Urbana, 1998, p. 165
"Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar."
"The difficulty," Senator Sherman said, "was with the President himself. He had neither dignity, order, nor firmness."
"... in our greedy chase to make profit of the Negro, let us beward, lest we 'cancel and tear to pieces' even the white man's charter of freedom" (CW 2:276)
General James S. Wadsworth said that Lincoln was contemptuous of abolitionists and "spoke ofter of the slaves as cattle."
Donn Piatt said Lincoln expressed "no sympathy for the slave" and no dislike for slaveowners and "laughed at the Abolitionists as a disturbing element easily controlled."
Eli thayer said Lincoln spoke of abolitionists "in terms of contempt and derision."
Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his Journal that Lincoln "thinks emancipation almost morally wrong and resorts to it only as a despearte measure..."
Jessie Benton Fremont called Lincoln "the Pontius Pilate of the Slaves"