Note From Lincoln Found in Racist Book
So, are we supposed to think that if whites and blacks "evolved separately" from pre-human ancestors that actually would justify slavery?
Why, because some people at some time in the past said they thought it did?
Does it matter how far back in the pre-human family tree our ancestors are supposed to have separated?
Do tell us more.
As for Lincoln, for all this bien-pensant keeper of Lincoln's unsullied memory has to say, old Abe might very well have believed the theory of separate origin.
We know he was convinced of Negro inferiority and toyed somewhat wistfully with the idea of voluntary removal of freedmen and other black Americans to Africa.
He might, had he lived, have been as soft on the South as Johnson.
He might have accepted, and helped the country accept much sooner, the regime of Jim Crow and compulsory segregation as a poor second best, once voluntary removal had failed.
He was never the social and political integrationist some of the Radical Republicans were and he repeatedly and publicly condemned those views.
But we know for a fact he hated slavery and dragged both the rump USA and the unacknowledged CSA through utter Hell to destroy it.
In this, the foolish South may very well have played into his hands.
After all, after Dred Scott the Slave Power had beaten the antislavery forces to a pulp, as Lincoln knew and admitted.
The South had won its cause, but by then was too alienated and worn out with fighting to accept victory and stay in the Union.
So they left and gave Lincoln and the antislavery cause his and its last and only chance, war.
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