Lincoln freed the slaves solely out of military necessity.

Evidence

Lincoln had never been an Abolitionist; he had never believed in full Negro citizenship; he had tried desperately to win the war without Negro soldiers, and he had emancipated the slaves only on account of military necessity, (p. 153) Freedom for the slave was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting, (p. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1124

Categorization

• XREF: Du Bois’s revisionist Lincoln contradicts the hagiographic mainstream American Lincoln myth.