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Premise: Lincoln hated blacks. True or false??

Despite video movie portrayals of Lincoln,

A) Lincoln bombed the towns where blacks lived. Many would die. That is an act of love or hate?

B) Lincoln did not free the Northern slaves. His declaration only effected 50k of 4 mil blacks. Only 1% of blacks were freed. Love or hate.

C) He declared he wanted to send the blacks back to Africa. If that all is love, it sure is hostile love.

Truth is the Christian Abolitionists freed the slaves, Lincoln followed along reluctantly and took false credit like politicians do. TV & movies are rarely accurate depictions.

Still at it? Enough nonsense. By the standards of our day, everybody in 1860s America was "racist." By the standards of that time, Lincoln was less biased than most of his contemporaries.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure justifed by the president's war powers. No president had the power to free the slaves in peacetime. It took a constitutional amendment to do that. And Lincoln fought for that amendment until Congress passed it.

In the 1820s and 1830s, when Lincoln was young, if you had qualms about slavery -- if you thought slavery might not be a good thing and looked forward to an end to it -- the odds very much were that you were for "gradual emancipation" and repatriation of freed slaves back to Africa.

That's the way most people who were opposed to slavery or critical of it -- not at all a large percentage of the population, by the way -- thought and that's how Lincoln thought. It was a package deal, and almost nobody believed in citizenship and civic equality for African-Americans.

It took time for him to get over it. He still had hopes of voluntary repatriation well into the war, but the idea that he he wanted to forcibly expel all African-Americans to Africa has no basis in fact.

At the end of the war, Lincoln, in contrast to most Americans, was willing to grant the vote to some African-Americans. How does that accord with the idea that he had a deep-rooted, irradicable hatred of Blacks.

Now imagine if you can that you were alive 150 years ago and were a typical white American. Would you really have thought of blacks as your equals? And have looked favorably on the Confederacy at the same time? Really?