again, he did not merely pay it lip service for votes at the moment - which alone would be rather damning. By all accounts he believed in the flamingly racist statements he made publicly and repeatedly. He said similar things to small groups and to individuals. There is zero evidence he did not believe what he said.
And once again context. What "we don't know" is what that fragment about "fudge" was supposed to be mean about "Negro equality." That's not at all clear.
LOL! C'mon! You're trying to weasel here and you're not very convincing at it. Lincoln was an open and avowed racist. His own words make that clear and while you say there's no evidence he was more racist than most others, I'd say he was. He not only thought nonWhites not the equal of Whites, he ethnically cleansed Indians and tried to deport Blacks. He was head of the American Colonization Society which was dedicated to the purpose after all.
He sarcastically told his old friend Alexander Stephens that newly freed blacks would have to "root hog or die" to scratch a living out of the soil. Then there is this from Frederick Douglas:
Frederick Douglass says the President of the United States has become an “itinerant colonization preacher,” who has made himself look “ridiculous” by pitching this idea that we should leave the nation of our birth https://psmag.com/news/remember-that-time-abraham-lincoln-tried-to-get-the-slaves-to-leave-america-55802
There is of course much more for anyone who cares to look and who is not interested in simply making excuses for Lincoln. You say exclusionary laws against Blacks were repealed after the war. Yes its true they were.......years and years after the war. Blacks did not start moving North in any numbers until the 1880s despite the fact that the South had been plunged into dire poverty. Hint: that's when Blacks finally could move North. Even then there were riots against Blacks in several Northern states.
I never said Lincoln believed in racial equality. I said he didn't. But he was never as racist as most of his countrymen, and his true feelings about race were far more complicated than your oversimplifications.
You didn't address the quote I gave:
My friends, I have detained you about as long as I desire to do, and I have only to say, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race, and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position, discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.
It was from an speech Lincoln gave to abolitionists on July 10, 1858. Stephen Douglas repeatedly referred to that speech and quoted from it in his debates with Lincoln, so that Lincoln, to avoid losing the election had to disassociate himself more forcefully from the idea of racial equality than he ordinarily would have. That accounts for some of his remarks in his own speeches at the debates, so that the meaning behind those remarks is not necessarily to be taken at face value.
Here is another quote from the speech to the abolitionists:
I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices—”me” “no one,” &c.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of “no, no,”] let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]
And another:
So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can. If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature.
I notice that you also have never responded to the fact that Southern planters wanted to keep the freed slaves on their plantations because they needed the labor and they used debt and other devices to do so.
We said the same things for years when PC Revisionists applied late 20th and 21st century standards of morality to Confederate leaders from 150+ years ago. Well goose, gander etc. If we're gonna do that for one side then we need to do it equally for the other.
But Confederate leaders were already condemned by the standards of their own time. It was post-war revisionism that made people forget that. I don't deny that Lincoln and most Northerners look awful on race by today's standards. I do oppose trying to make them look worse than they were at the time by holding them up to standards they were barely (or not at all aware of).
Look, I'm not up at 4 in the morning for the fun of it. Going on line helps me to forget stuff I'm going through right now. But I'm not in any mood to carry on some interminable argument about nothing with everything else going on now. So I'm going to stop responding now. I've got too much going on in the real world to bother with this endless, unresolvable garbage. I posted to point out mistakes that you made and now I have done that and expressed my own point of view which you have ignored or found unconvincing. No need to drag things out.