Vigorously? Make me laugh. Here’s what he had to say a couple of lines later:
The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day.
You idiot, he was responding to Lincoln and his savagery; of course he thought slavery was more humane than this;
“You and we are different races,” Lincoln observed. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races . . . . This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both” and “affords a reason at least why we should be separated . . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
“The colony of Liberia has been in existence a long time. In a certain sense it is a success. The old President of Liberia, Roberts, has just been with me – the first time I ever saw him. He says they have within the bounds of that colony between 300,000 and 400,000 people . . . . They are not all American [black] colonists, or their descendants. Something less than 12,000 have been sent hither from this country. Many of the original settlers have died, yet, like people elsewhere, their offspring outnumber those deceased.”
In 1856? What savagery do you accuse Lincoln of in 1856?
Amazing that Lee, in an 1856 letter, knew what Lincoln was going to say years later.
...of course he thought slavery was more humane than this;
If slavery is more 'humane' than freedom then perhaps you would like to try it out?