[Iris7]

"Not one of your posts has included a quote from Lincoln saying where he supported the forced deportation of blacks."

That is true. I have never seen any statement creditably claimed to be Lincoln's that advocated forced deportation. At the time I was trying to get into Lincoln's head, I decided that he was wistfully hopeful that the blacks would all want to leave when given the opportunity. I don't know if Lincoln saw that this mass departure of happy blacks was only a foolish dream.

Besides, when you run the numbers, transport of the era would be very strained indeed to accomplish such a thing. It would take five or ten years, anyway.

[Drennan Whyte]

At the time I was trying to get into Lincoln's head, I decided that he was wistfully hopeful that the blacks would all want to leave when given the opportunity. I don't know if Lincoln saw that this mass departure of happy blacks was only a foolish dream.

Perhaps the answer lies in the heads of the overwhelming majority of the people in this country, North and South. To say that racism ran strong in the U.S. is an understatement. Blacks would never be accepted as equals, you had a Supreme Court decision that said they couldn't even be accepted as citizens. Hatred and mistrust of blacks were the norm. Perhaps Lincoln, knowing that they would never be accepted as equals and suspecting the problems that they would be facing, saw colonization as a chance for them to carve out their own future, free from the hatred and discrimination that they were sure to face here?