IIRC, Lincoln also suggested to Frederick Douglass and others, that emancipated slaves be re-settled outside the US. Alexander Stephens reported that shortly before Lincoln's assasination, he told Stephens he had no plans for assisting freed slaves in adjusting to their new way of life. That was reportedly during a conversation they had at Hampton Roads. As Stephens relates it, Lincoln said, "I guess they'll just have to 'root hog or die.'" That would have fit Lincoln, since he followed black minstrelsy and "Root Hog Or Die" was popular at the time.
All of the founding fathers were rank hypocrites yet still struggled with the issue of slavery.
Now lets move on to more pressing concerns....was Lincoln gay? < /sarc>
From Frederick Douglass' 1876 oration in memory of Lincoln:
"He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government.
The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect, let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But while in the abundance of your wealth, and in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion, you do all this, we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose."
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=39
Lincoln related the circumstances behind the story in to Alexander McClure.
"You see," said he, "we had reached and were discussing the slavery question. Mr. Hunter said, substantially, that the slaves, always accustomed to an overseer, and to work upon compulsion, suddenly freed, as they would be if the South should consent to peace on the basis of the 'Emancipation Proclamation,' would precipitate not only themselves, but the entire Southern society, into irremediable ruin. No work would be done, nothing would be cultivated, and both blacks and whites would starve!"
Said the President: "I waited for Seward to answer that argument, but as he was silent, I at length said: 'Mr. Hunter, you ought to know a great deal better about this argument than I, for you have always lived under the slave system. I can only say, in reply to your statement of the case, that it reminds me of a man out in Illinois, by the name of Case, who undertook, a few years ago, to raise a very large herd of hogs. It was a great trouble to feed them, and how to get around this was a puzzle to him. At length he hit on the plan of planting an immense field of potatoes, and, when they were sufficiently grown, he turned the whole herd into the field, and let them have full swing, thus saving not only the labor of feeding the hogs, but also that of digging the potatoes. Charmed with his sagacity, he stood one day leaning against the fence, counting his hogs, when a neighbor came along.
"'Well, well,' said he, 'Mr. Case, this is all very fine. Your hogs are doing very well just now, but you know out here in Illinois the frost comes early, and the ground freezes for a foot deep. Then what you going to do?'
"This was a view of the matter which Mr. Case had not taken into account. Butchering time for hogs was 'way on in December or January! He scratched his head, and at length stammered: 'Well, it may come pretty hard on their snouts, but I don't see but that it will be "root, hog, or die."'"
Lincoln was talking to one of the Confederate commissioners, Hunter. Hunter was expressing his concern about what would happen to southren society without the slave labor that provided their wealth. Without slaves, Hunter complained, no work would be done. Nothing would be harvested. People would starve. So when Lincoln related the story it was to point out that the white population could no longer live off the labors of their chattle. The white population would have to work for a change. It was the white population that would have to 'root hog, or die' not the former slaves.
I guess you never heard of the American Colonization Society --- founded by James Madison when Lincoln was just a kid. The aim was to free slaves and fund a nation for them where they could live free. It did form the nation of Liberia. Neither Madison or Lincoln could see how freed slaves could ever reach full citizenship in the US when you considered the racial attitudes of the day. Were they wrong in that belief? Consider that it was 100 years after Lincoln died and all slaves were free before many blacks were even allowed to take a pee in the same toilet as a white.
Ask yourself the question. If you were black in 1860, would you have wanted to stay in the US, or would you have rather had your own nation?