Lincoln opposed Black equality while opposing slavery, fearing white voter backlash

Evidence

But Lincoln worried about the consequences of the radical step toward abolition. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed Black equality. And he feared that a proclamation calling for the emancipation of enslaved people in the rebel states would alienate white moderates who supported a war to maintain the Union but were not willing to fight over slavery. His political career had shown him the limits of what white American voters would tolerate. During the 1850s, Lincoln never could have won election in Illinois, a virulently racist state, had he embraced racial equality. Prior to becoming president, as a lawyer and politician in Illinois, Lincoln himself had believed that free Black people amounted to a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?” he had asked just a few years before the Civil War. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 128

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reader wants to know how revisionist historians and defenders respond to this Lincoln material — the reader is using this as a case study in how historical controversy works, and Lincoln’s actual racial views are a contested empirical claim central to that debate.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s case-study goal: the Wilentz letter dispute over 1619’s treatment of the founding — Lincoln’s own racial views are similarly contested ground between the reframing school and traditional historians.