[agrandis]

Thanks for that very intresting post (#783). It's strange, in that it reads so very modern, and so contradictory to so many other things Honest Abe said in public and private. I shall have to check into this book. I have to say that, correctly or not, my BS-O-Meter is being pegged in reding that quote (kind of like Barara Streisand's "Shakespeare quote"), much the way my Stretching-it-O-Meter went off when I read some parts of DiLorenzo's book.

[Ditto]

I'm surprised that your BS Meter moves on that one. That is a pretty well known quote from a very well know private letter to an old friend of his. Joshua Speed was a slave owner himself and the letter covers their differences on the Kansas-Nebraska question.

You are correct that it is different in tone from what he often said in public --- he was a politician after all. In an age when it was not at all popular or even healthy in many parts of the country to express any sympathy for blacks or Catholics or any other minority, Lincoln chose his public words carefully and often did not express his true feelings. Around the same time Lincoln wrote this, an abolitionist newspaper editor was lynched by a pro-slavery mob in Alton Illinois.

|Here is a link to the entire text of the letter. Letter to Joshua Speed It is very good insight to the arguments and issues of the day.