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You don't see the word "inferior"? Splitting hairs, Walt.

None of the quotes you provided can support an interpretation that Lincoln thought blacks intellectually or morally inferior. In fact, he said plainly during the debates that he didn't know that very thing.

And in the July 10 speech he said that all men were created equal.

Lincoln danced around this quite a bit in this time frame. He -was- a lawyer after all. But you can't put him on the record as saying blacks were inferior. And later he said:

"....peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men, who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it."

You'd rather be identified with the former than the latter, wouldn't you? I sure would.

Walt

... in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephan Douglas Lincoln said: "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position."

In the same speech he added: "Anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the Negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.", And "free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We cannot, then, make them equals."

I am certain that you are familiar with these quotes, but would like to pretend you aren't. Well, here they are again.

"Lincoln, however, was not an abolitionist. He thought that the immediate emancipation of all slaves would cause untold suffering and instability. Nor did he support radical integration of the races. He argued, for example, that just because he believed in freedom and equality for the Negro, this didn't mean he would like to marry one."

Saul Sigelschiffer, The American Conscience: The Drama of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Horizon, 1973) p. 281.