Who during that period wasn't an open and avowed racist, when measured by today's standards?
As I mentioned in my post, there were many in the North who sympathized with the Confederacy and actually wanted slavery to be preserved there because whites in places like NY, NJ, MA, and CT with the new factories and industries did not want blacks to come up and take their jobs in those places away. And those sorts of sentiments sparked the violent anti draft riots in New York City in 1863. Learned a lot about this at the Civil War Museum in Richmond at Tredegar.
Strange time to start opposing Presentism.
Where have you been for the last 25-30 years when that same standard was applied by PCers to lots of other historical figures?