It' s not that easy being a Lincoln defender as Fehrenbacher proved unwittingly when he crafted the most ingenious defense in the whole Lincoln catalog. Faced with the Charleston Confession (CW 3:145-6) in which Lincoln said he opposed Negro citizenship and equal rights, Fehrenbacher said that "if he [Lincoln] had responded differently at Charleston and elsewhere, the Lincoln of history simply would not exist" (1987, 105-6), meaning, if words have any meaning, that if Lincoln had not come out for White supremacy and racial separation in the nineteenth century, he would not be a national symbol of brotherhood and integration in the twentieth, meaning, if words have any meaning, that racism is historically defensible if a tragic assassination and myths make you into the opposite of what you were.
Beyond all that, the argument, though ingenious, is insufficient. There is no evidence and there will never be enough evidence to prove that Lincoln had to say the specific things he said in the Charleston Confession and elsewhere in order to get elected. What he said, in fact, lost the election and was at best of marginal importance to the presidential power brokers who wanted a conservative candidate with a public image to the right of Chase and Seward and who were more impressed by the tone of his Cooper Institute address than his Charleston Confession. We can say inversely that what Lincoln said at Charleston and elsewhere went further than the situation required, even for realpolitik, and that history, despite the default of historians, will never let him forget it. The same thing can be said about Lincoln's gratuitous statements about the "natural disgust" about Black and White sex, his references to Mexican "mongrels" and n----rs, and his quixotic campaign for colonization. But it doesn't matter. For a man who race-baits in order to get elected and who supports man-hunting, woman-hunting, and children-hunting because of his ambition has nothing to say to us, no matter how many historians sing his praises.
If we examine these defenses closer, we realize that the inarticulate major premise of all Lincoln schools is a defense of contemporary racial policies by a defense of Lincoln's conservatism and his anti-Black opposition to immediate, general and real freedom for Blacks. Benjamin Thomas puts himself in Lincoln's place and writes, "One must be realistic about this slavery issue, Lincoln thought" (112). Where have we heard this before? My God, yes, that's what segregationists and their White liberal allies said in the days of segregation. That's what segregationists and their White liberal allies have always said. Lord Charnwood, Lincoln's English biographer, denounced "the cold pedantry" of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and others who criticized Lincoln "on the ground of some natural right of all men to the suffrage." The true policy, Charnwood said, thinking about the South Africa of his day, was "doubtless that which [Cecil] Rhodes and other statesmen adopted in the Cape Colony [in South Africa] and which Lincoln had advocated in the case of Louisiana" (334-5).
You are talking about the 1850's, right?
When black soldiers served under Old Glory, President Lincoln began to work for full rights for them.
And as the letters I've included before show, he did much to increase the number of blacks recruited.
Also, I don't know about any "Charleston confession." Lincoln consistently said ther D of I applied to all.
Walt