I like something with a bit more pith:
"He {Lincoln] also began to understand the effect that slavery had on white Southerners. He took great interest in affairs in Kentucky, where his father-in-law, Robert S. Todd, along with Henry Clay, was working for gradual emancipation, which they hoped the Kentucky constitutional convention of 1849 would endorse. But the convention overwhelmingly rejected all plans to end slavery or even to ameliorate it. Todd, a candidate for the senate, died during the campaign; had he lived, he could have been disastrously defeated. These developments gave Lincoln a new insight into Southern society. Even nonslaveholders, who constituted an overwhelming majority of the Kentucky voters, were opposed to any form of emancipation. The prospect of owning slaves, he learned, was "highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy headed young men," because slaves were "the most glittering ostentatious and displaying property in the world." As a young Kentuckian told him, "You might have any amount of land; money in your pocket or bank stock and while traveling around no body would be any wiser, but if you had a darkey trudging at your heels every body would see him and know that you owned slaves."
- "Lincoln" by David Donald, p. 116
Walt
[Wlat 1751] I like something with a bit more pith:
Well, Wlat, your hero Lincoln liked it just as I quoted it in my 1740.
At Lincoln's direction, or at least with Lincoln's approval, James Mitchell prepared a master plan for the final solution of the Black problem, Letter on the Relation of the White and African Races in the United States, Showing the Necessity of the Colonization of the Latter.
This official document of the U.S. Government, printed by the Government Printing Office, dated May 18, 1862, was addressed to "His Excellency Abraham Lincoln". THAT is the 28-page document whose text I provided.
Evidently, Lincoln read it and said, "That's my guy!" He then immediately recruited him for the team and gave him a signing bonus -- Lincoln elevated James Mitchell to Commissioner of [Black] Emigration. It would appear that this letter passed the Lincoln test for merit. Less than 90 days after Mitchell submitted this pile of racist bilge to Lincoln, Mitchell was escorting a group of Black's for them to receive a lecture from Lincoln about why they should hop on a boat and find another continent to live in.
As Mitchell noted in the master plan, "If they should fail to do this, there would then be more propriety in weighing the requirement of some to remove without consultation, but not till then." The plan called for the Black's to be given a chance to leave voluntarily, but to be forced it they did not volunteer. Mitchell justified this by stating, "We know that there is a growing sentiment in the country which considered the removal of the freed man, without consulting him, "a moral and military necessity" -- as a measure necessary to the purity of public morals and the peace of the country...."
The object of this plan, to remove all Blacks from the country, forcibly if necessary, was so thinly veiled that nobody ever believed it but Wlat. Frederick Douglass likened Lincoln to a horse thief, possessed of American prejudice and Negro hatred.
Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., p. 453-62
Monitoring all this, and collating the information he received from Lincoln insiders, Adam Gurowski told his diary in August 1862 that "the President is indefatigable in his efforts to -- save slavery" (1:256)
He was also indefatigable in his efforts to ship Blacks out of the country...
To facilitate his plans for the racial cleansing of America, Lincoln created a Black emigration department, without giving it that name, in the Interior Department and employed James Mitchell, an Indiana minister and American Colonization Society acivist who had worked with him on colonization issues in Springfield. At Lincoln's direction, or at least with Lincoln's approval, Mitchell prepared a master plan for the final solution of the Black problem, Letter on the Relation of the white and African Races in the United States, Showing the Necessity of the colonization of the Latter. In this official document of the U.S. Government, printed by the Government Printing Office and mailed on May 18, 1862, to "His Excellency Abraham Lincoln," Mitchell said that the presence of the Negro race on the North American continent was more dangerous to the peace of the country than the Civil War. For "terrible as is this Civil War between men of kindred race for the dominion of the servant, future history will show that is has been moderate and altogether tolerable when contrasted with a struggle between the black and white race, which, within the next one or two hundred years must sweep over this nation, unless the wise and prudent statesmen of this generation avert it"
The chief danger in the future, Mitchell told Lincoln, was that "we have 4,500,000 persons, who, whilst amonst us, cannot be of us..."
Why couldn't they be "of us"?
They were, he said, of a different race, a race that threatens the blood stream of the nation and "is giving to this continent a nation of bastards."
* * *
On page after page of his government-sponsored diatribe, Mitchell warns against endangering the purity of White blood by "this repulsive admixture of blood," the "possible admixture of inferior blood," attempts to engraft "Negro blood on the population," and attempts "to pour the blood of near five million Africans into the veins of the Republic"
* * *
It would be pleasant to report that Abraham Lincoln read this repulsive mixture of racism and fascism and immediately fired Rev. Mitchell. But instead of firing Mitchell, Lincoln promoted him and gave him the task of rounding up four or five "intelligent" colored men who believed in colonization and who were willing to listen to Abraham Lincoln tell them why it was good for them
And so, on Thursday, August 14, the Rev. James Mitchell, the man the New York Tribune and other papers called America's official "commissioner of [Black] Emigration," led a group of five Black men into the executive office and introduced them to His Excellency Abraham Lincoln. This was, we are told, the first time in history that African-Americans had been invited to the White House to confer on an official matter. If so, it was an inauspicious occasion, for the president of the United States used this forum to tell native-born Americans of African descent that it was their duty to leave America for racial reasons.
* * *
Frederick Douglass attacked Lincoln's logic and his racism, saying that "a horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveler's pocket is the sole first cause of his robbery are about as much entitled to respect as is the President's reasoning at this point. Lincoln's position didn't surprise Douglass. "Illogical and unfair as Mr. Lincoln's statements are, they are nevertheless quite in keeping with his whole course from the beginning of his administration up to this day, and confirm the painful conviction that though elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters, Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, that for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity" (FD 3:268)
* * *
The most serious charge against Lincoln came from Douglas and other Blacks who said the president of the United States was fanning the flames of bigotry and inciting acts of violence against Black men and women and their children.
"Mr. Lincoln takes care," Douglass wrote, "in urging his colonization scheme to furnish a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country." In pressing his suit, Lincoln, Douglass said, showed his bigotry, "his pride of race and blood," and "his contempt for Negroes." (FD 3:267)
Citations:
Gurowski, Adam. Diary. 3 vols. 1862-1866. Reprint: New York, 1968
The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner, 4 vols. New York, 1955