Lincoln advocated colonizing blacks because he doubted racial civil equality was possible

Evidence

Abraham Lincoln took an antislavery stand, reviving his dead political career as he vied for Illinois’s second US Senate seat across from Stephen Douglas in 1854. He scolded the “monstrous injustice” in a long speech in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854. But he did not know what to do “as to the existing institution,” adding, “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.” But that was impossible. “What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? … Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feeling will not admit this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 537 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Black Americans denounced the meeting. Frederick Douglass, perhaps the greatest American this country has ever produced, called Lincoln’s colonization scheme “a safety valve…for white racism” and said that the meeting “expresses merely a desire to get rid of” Black Americans. That August meeting was the only time Lincoln took his colonization proposal directly to Black Americans. The next month, in September 1862, he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that advocated colonization, and in his annual address to Congress in December, he called for a constitutional amendment to aid colonization, which became Lincoln’s last known public call to colonize Black Americans. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 134 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Douglass understood that Lincoln existed as both an “astute politician and a man of principle,” according to Christopher Bonner, a historian and the author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. Bonner says that Douglass’s perspective is vital for understanding Lincoln. “We would do well to listen to Douglass,” he told me. “Douglass knew Lincoln, Douglass knew slavery, and Douglass knew the nineteenth-century United States, and so he is a great source for us to understand Lincoln’s complexity.” Douglass understood that Lincoln’s ideas about Black people changed over the course of the war. The president had been deeply moved by the valor of the Black men who’d helped save the Union and had been influenced by Black men such as Douglass, whom he held in high esteem. Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated colonization, by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 140 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Lincoln publicly argued Black and white Americans mutually suffered from coexistence — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 131; Lincoln opposed Black equality while opposing slavery, fearing white voter backlash — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 128; Lincoln opposed slavery while refusing Black equality, blending antislavery with colonization. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 537 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Lincoln opposed slavery while refusing Black equality, blending antislavery with colonization. #corroborates (0.95) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 537
• Lincoln coupled emancipation with proposals to colonize Black Americans abroad #corroborates (0.93) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 134
• Lincoln’s racial views evolved during the war from colonization to abolition. #complicates (0.84) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 140