I can't put my hands on my own source, having not thought about this subject in over twenty years. However, there are several hits on Bennet's recent "Forced Into Glory"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=s_sf_b_as/002-0798763-4442408
"ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the American president revered as "The Great Emancipator" for leading the war to abolish slavery, was really a racist who used offensive language to describe black people and wanted all Afro-Americans deported, according to newly published research which has prompted controversy in the United States.
Far from being the willing forefather of today's multicultural America, President Lincoln advocated reserving the west of the country for whites, supported a law forbidding black people to settle in his home state of Illinois and was fond of racist jokes. He used two State of the Union addresses to call for the deportation of black people and shortly before his assassination in 1865 said of the thousands of slaves to be freed at the end of the Civil War: "I believe it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate which they could have to themselves."
He also habitually used the word "nigger" to describe black people, something which would have shocked and dismayed the hundreds of thousands of civil rights activists in the Sixties who made the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC the focus of some of the biggest demonstrations the city has seen.
The assault on President Lincoln's character and record in a book called Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, was produced over seven years by Lerone Bennett Jr, the executive editor of Ebony, a magazine aimed at black Americans. Mr Bennett regards what he calls the "Massa Lincoln myth" as a 135-year-old problem, "one of the most extraordinary efforts I know to hide a whole man and a whole history, particularly when that man is one of the most celebrated men in American history".
The evidence of Lincoln's true racial beliefs is easily found, he says, in his writing and speeches. Lincoln blamed black people for the Civil War, declaring: "But for your race among us there could not be a war, although many men on either side do not care for you one way or another."
Although in popular history he is given the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation - which itself did not directly call for the elimination of slavery - he only issued it under pressure from other Republicans in Congress, Mr Bennett said. However, Lincoln was seized upon by progressive Americans following his assassination, which came soon after the Confederate surrender. There was "an explosion of emotion" in the North and Lincoln was "appropriated, he was used", Mr Bennett said.
By the late Sixties Lincoln's death was put in the same bracket by civil rights campaigners as the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the black Church leader. The book has prompted controversy among academics with one black professor calling it "a compelling critique" of the revered president's life. But Lincoln's defenders are infuriated by the attack."
"In the latter part of 1999 a book was released whose publisher made the bold claim that it would set history on its ear.
The book is entitled Forced Into Glory - Abraham Lincoln's White Dream and its author, Lerone Bennett, Jr., has made headlines by challenging our current thinking about Abraham Lincoln and his image as The Great Emancipator.
Far from being a racial egalitarian, Mr. Bennett portrays Lincoln as a white supremacist whose real objective as President was the "ethnic cleansing" of America. According to Mr. Bennett's book, "[Lincoln} did everything he could to deport Blacks and to make America a Great White Place. If Lincoln had his way, Oprah Winfrey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Sr., Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, and even Clarence Thomas would have been born in slavery. If Lincoln had his way, there would be no Blacks in America at all. None."
Mr. Bennett sums up his view of Lincoln writing, "Unlike [Martin Luther] King, unlike [Wendell ]Phillips, unlike [Frederick] Douglass, but like [Thomas] Jefferson, Lincoln dreamed of an all-White nation, governed by White people, only for White people."
To accomplish this all-White nation, Lincoln sought to use a plan, which Mr. Bennett describes throughout his book as "DEPORTATION," more commonly known to historians as "colonization."
According to Mr. Bennett, Lincoln's real policy as President was the implementation of the age-old plan of establishing colonies in foreign lands where America's Blacks could be shipped; thus, in Mr. Bennett's words, "cleansing America of both free and freed Blacks."
Mr. Bennett is not an aberration on the historical scene. He and his thesis are real. He has become a highly sought-after speaker on the Lincoln circuit. Since publication of his book, Mr. Bennett has appeared in nearly every major publication in the country and more important, he has been invited as the featured speaker at the most prestigious Lincoln conferences throughout the country."
Bennett, who is black, has really stirred up a hornet's nest. Bennett calls the conventional view held mostly in the North "mythic", and I find this true. Myself, I pretty much forget that this stuff is not common knowledge.