Lincoln told Black leaders they caused the Civil War and should leave the country.

Evidence

Douglass then launched into a breathtaking litany of Lincoln’s shortcomings, referring in part to that White House meeting with Black leaders in 1862: “Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost…when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born.” However, though the Union was worth more to Lincoln than enslaved people’s freedom, Douglass said, “under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 139

Categorization

• QUESTION: Douglass’s testimony that Lincoln blamed Black people for the war in the 1862 White House meeting is a specific contested historical claim worth verifying against other accounts.