Lincoln opposed slavery while refusing Black equality, blending antislavery with colonization.

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is a textbook specimen of Kendi’s assimilationist position: opposing slavery’s injustice while treating Black equality as unthinkable — useful as a defining example of the category the reader is tracking.
• QUESTION: Directly tests the reader’s planned countercase: here an idea (opposing slavery) appears to precede policy. Worth examining whether Lincoln’s antislavery stance is best read as an idea or as a political self-interest calculation.