Duhhh. Wake up! Lincoln was speaking in 1852, eulogizing Henry Clay, and affirming the life-long held beliefs of Clay. It had nothing to do with Civil War. The great fear of these racists was almagamation. The greatest threat was mixing of the races.
SOURCE: Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., pp. 267-270
This much is clear: What Lincoln said was one thing, and what he did was another. From first to last, in war and in peace, his approach to slavery was based on five paradoxes, and all the problems of his interpreters can be traced to their attempts to ignore one or more of these paradoxes.
The first paradox -- to repeat-is that the man who said that America could not endure half slave and half free did everything he could for fifty-four of his fifty-six years to ensure that America remained half slave and half free.
The second paradox is that Lincoln believed White freedom was a unction of Black unfreedom and that the continued freedom and prosperity of Whites in the South and the North depended on the continued enslavement and debasement of Blacks in the South. Lincoln didn't hide it; he didn't whisper it; he said out loud that the constitutional compromise of 1787 between White freedom and Black slavery ensured the White Constitution and White liberty that enslaving Blacks and keeping them subordinate was a White necessity. "We had slavery among us," Lincoln said, "we could not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more..." (CW 2:501, italics added).
Never before had the truth appeared so clearly:
White good was a function of Black bad.
Whites were up because Blacks were down.
Whites were rich because Blacks were poor.
Whites were free because Blacks were slaves.
By announcing that shameful secret, without shame, Lincoln embraced it and made himself responsible for it.
"We could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery...."
It followed from this that the paradox of White freedom was that it had a paramount duty to defend Black slavery.
"I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states," Lincoln said, "due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem), to let the slavery of the other states alone... "(CW 1:348).
What Lincoln said here is almost as astounding as what he said above For what does this mean if not that the paradox of Lincoln liberty was that its first duty was to defend slavery.
So saying, Lincoln endorsed -- without a dissenting voice from any of his interpreters to date -- the peculiarly Western idea that you can sacrifice some people in order to enrich others. It never seemed to occur to him until the Second Inaugural Address, which he immediately forgot, that everyone who makes that bargain makes or finds his own Gettysburg and ends up meditating on the terrible and self-enforcing imperatives that humans must choose for ALL or for none and that you can't question the humanity of others without losing your own.
Flowing with and out of this was an even greater paradox. For Lincoln didn't believe, as we have seen, that slavery "could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself" (CW 2:130, Lincoln's italics).
What an extraordinary thing to say! What could possibly be a greater evil to the cause of human liberty than slavery? Freeing all slaves at once, Lincoln said, knocking down all the fences at once -- Lincoln's metaphor -- and producing the specter of racial mixing and racial conflict over jobs and other values.
The fifth paradox is that Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery not out of the interest of the slaves but out of the interests of Whites. When he made all those brave speeches about keeping slavery out of Kansas and California, he was not thinking about Black people at all-he was thinking about an endless vista of White settlements on the prairie. Speaking in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, he said that he, like Thomas Jefferson, wanted the territories to be the "the happy home of teeming millions of free, white, prosperous people, and no slave among them" (CW 2:249). In 1856 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he said the territories "should be kept open for the homes of free white people" (CW 2:363).
It was a litany: "We want them [the territories] for the homes of free white people." When Senator Douglas argued that Lincoln and his supporters had no direct interest in what happened in the territories, Lincoln replied, "I think we have some interest. I think that as white men we have. Do we not wish for an outlet for our surplus population, if I may so express myself?" (CW 3:311).
Lincoln went on to charge in this and other speeches that the extension of slavery posed a direct threat to the economic position of White men. He stressed in particular the threat to White labor and was not above the demagoguery of warning White labor of the threat of all Black labor, slave and free. If Northerners permitted slavery to spread to the territories, he said, "Negro equality will be abundant, as every White laborer will have occasion to regret when he is elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave niggers" (CW 3:78).
What was the best way to prevent this? The best thing to do, he said, was to keep the territories free of all Negroes, slave and free,whatever the spelling. "Is it not rather our duty to make labor more respectable by preventing all black competition, especially in the territories?" (CW 3:79, italics added). Notice that word: duty. We shall return to it again and again. Abraham Lincoln believed it was his duty to White people, that it was his obligation as a White man, to keep Black people in slavery and in subordinate positions.
Not the emancipation of the slaves, not the building of a rainbow nation, but the way to the White Dream was his main concern.