Your quote from the Greeley letter was cut so as to make it appear to say the opposite of what Lincoln actually meant.
Your quote about "mixed breed bastards" was from a letter to Lincoln. It wasn't something he actually said.
That is what we call "taking quotes out of context."
The "Fudge" comment was from Lincoln's unpublished notes. There's no telling if he actually made the comment or what he actually might have meant by it. Was he saying that "Negro equality" was absurd demagoguery or that the use of the bugbear of racial equality as an argument for slavery expansion was absurd demagoguery? We don't really know for sure.
We could call that "quoting without context."
Lincoln was explicit in his white supremacy, his opposition to Blacks being treated as equals and his abhorrence at the thought of White and Black mixing.
Of course. But no more so than anyone else at the time. In fact, far less than most of his contemporaries. He probably didn't like interracial marriage anymore than most of our grandparents did, but the fact that he talked about it so much in the debates was most likely due to the fact that so many of the voters hated the idea far more than he did. You find Lincoln talking about miscegenation in public because the topic was very much on votes mind and was something the Democrats used to attack him with, but the topic doesn't seem to turn up much in his private papers and letters, so far as I know.
You also missed Lincoln's passage about an African-American woman:
'In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others'.
That was a kind of equality and it was much more than most other Americans of Lincoln's day would have granted colored people.
There is a reason millions of Blacks did not leave the economically devastated South and move North at the conclusion of the war. They were trapped there for years unable to move to the North or anywhere else due to the virulent racism of Northerners.
A major reason was the "economic devastation of the South" which meant great poverty for Blacks. They didn't have the funds to up and move. Many were unskilled and unlikely to find much work outside the cotton or tobacco fields.
The freedmen did understand that they'd be discriminated against in the North -- it wasn't going to be easy for them when employers would much rather hire fellow Whites -- but there was nothing more "virulent" there than there was in the South.
Plus, you truly underestimate the desire of Southern planters to hold on to their workforce. It wasn't Yankees "trapping" anybody. Before the mechanization of agriculture really took hold, landowners did all they could to keep their workers in debt and on the plantation. It was only when plantation labor wasn't needed so much that large numbers of African Americans were allowed and encouraged to leave by the landowners.
Wait, are you going to maintain that Lincoln did not on several occasions speak of his horror at the idea of “miscegenation”?
We both know he did. The context is truthful.
We “don’t know” if Lincoln was not only opposed but fiercely opposed to equality?
Once again, we both know he was. He said so quite openly many times.
We will have to agree to disagree about Lincoln being more flaming or less flaming than most others at the time in his racism. What is beyond dispute is that he was an open and avowed racist. This was not merely something he said for public consumption either - as you and his other apologists would have it. He said similar things in private and among small groups or to individuals as well. Every indication is that he believed exactly what he said on the subject.
As to Blacks not moving up North:
Any claim that their failure to move was due to a lack of funds is comical. They could have and certainly would have taken the old (free) heel-toe express had they been allowed to move there. They weren’t. The Northern states were quite clear in not wanting Blacks and in making it practically impossible for them to move there. Multiple states like Kansas and Oregon explicitly banned them. Others like those in the Midwest and Northeast passed laws designed to keep them out and back that up with white mob violence against Blacks as well as a refusal to work alongside them.
So the Negro [in the North] is free, but he cannot share the rights, pleasures, labors, griefs, or even the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared; there is nowhere where he can meet him, neither in life nor in death. In the South, where slavery still exists, less trouble is taken to keep the Negro apart: they sometimes share the labors and the pleasures of the white men; people are prepared to mix with them to some extent; legislation is more harsh against them, but customs are more tolerant and gentle. -Alexis De Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”, Harper & Row, 1966, p.343.
Want quotes from other foreign observers? I can provide them as we both know.
No, it was not a lack of fund or a lack of job skills that kept Blacks in the economically devastated South after the war. It was virulent racism on the part of White Northerners.