According to the New York Tribune he sure did!
"Mr. Corwin's amendment to the Constitution prohibiting Congress from interfering with Slavery in the States finally prevailed by the bare Constitutional majority. It is known that Mr. Lincoln favored its passage" - New York Tribune, March 5, 1861
You know the story well enough.
Why try and deceive people?
"But the final version of the Thirteenth Amendment--the one ending slavery--has an interesting story of its own. Passed during the Civil War years, when southern congressional representatives were not present for debate, one would think today that it must have easily passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Not true. As a matter of fact, although passed in April 1864 by the Senate, with a vote of 38 to 6, the required two-thirds majority was defeated in the House of Representatives by a vote of 93 to 65. Abolishing slavery was almost exclusively a Republican party effort--only four Democrats voted for it.
It was then that President Abraham Lincoln took an active role in pushing it through congress. He insisted that the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment be added to the Republican party platform for the upcoming presidential elections. He used all of his political skill and influence to convince additional democrats to support the amendments' passage. His efforts finally met with success, when the House passed the bill in January 1865 with a vote of 119-56. Finally, Lincoln supported those congressmen that insisted southern state legislatures must adopt the Thirteenth Amendment before their states would be allowed to return with full rights to Congress.
The fact that Lincoln had difficulty in gaining passage of the amendment towards the closing months of the war and after his Emancipation Proclamation had been in effect 12 full months, is illustrative. There was still a reasonably large body of the northern people, or at least their elected representatives, that were either indifferent towards, or directly opposed to, freeing the slaves."
http://members.tripod.com/~greatamericanhistory/gr02011.htm
But President wanted, and worked hard for, equal rights for blacks.
Walt
Yep! Want to hear it again? Here goes:
In December 1860 William Seward sent his political agent Thurlow Weed to Springfield for a meeting with Lincoln on what to do about secession. Lincoln spent the day meeting with Weed and then instructed him to have Seward propose a series of constitutional amendments to stave off secession. One of them was the amendment permanentlyprotecting slavery, and Seward proposed it the next week in Senate committee. The Senate stalled for the next month, but the House soon took it up and it proceeded through the legislative process until Lincoln's arrival in DC that February. By then it was fighting an uphill battle in both chambers so Lincoln met to strategize about its passage with the House sponsor, Thomas Corwin. Lincoln instructed Corwin to reconcile the House language with the Senate version that he had Seward propose two months earlier and then began to whip for its passage among the House members. Lincoln rallied enough Republican supporters to push the bill through on the narrowest of votes then went over to the Senate to once again work his magic. Just as the NY Tribune reported, he used his influence to whip the votes there as well. The amendment went to a contentious and heated floor debate on the weekend before the inaugural and none other than the president elect himself slipped into the Senate gallery to watch his amendment shepherded to passage. And pass it did, as Henry Adams noted, due directly to the hard work of the incoming president. A day later he endorsed the thing in his inaugural address and went so far as to presume its ratification was a given, though he did tell a characteristic fib claiming that he had never seen the very same amendment he helped write and personally lobbied through congress.