Lincoln and Racial Equality: Emancipation vs. Self Interest

Written by Julio C. Leon II | May 2021 |

The American public has persistently admired Abraham Lincoln, long after his infamous and untimely death.  Historians often regard Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator,” and he is frequently thought of as being one of the most radical agents for change in race relations in nineteenth century America for his opposition to the institution of slavery in the United States.  However, as progressive as his ideas appear, they do not take into account Lincoln’s other less well-known views on racial equality that greatly contrast the ones he presented in his most famous speeches.  While Lincoln declared he despised the institution of slavery and sought liberty for Black people languishing in it, this did not constitute a belief that freedmen ought to be equal to whites in “all respects.”  In freeing enslaved Black Americans, one of his most long-held positions asserted that the best solution for freed slaves was not be elevated to equal status as white citizens but to be sent back to colonize Africa to preserve an America only for whites.  He opposed a bill in the Illinois legislature giving freed Black Americans suffrage and stood by Whigs who repeatedly espoused vitriolic racial prejudices many times over the course of his career.  Lincoln’s words and deeds over time are irreconcilable, which invites the question of whether he was the truly progressive president who ought to be praised today or a political opportunist who did what was necessary to court votes depending on his audience.  Through an examination of Lincoln’s writings and actions, it is apparent that he was not the forward-thinking statesman contemporary Americans consider him to be but instead was a political opportunist who used the issue of slavery to advance his own career and the interests of white Americans above all else.

In Lincoln’s early political career, many of the positions he took both personally and politically in Illinois stood in stark contrast with his rhetoric during his later political career and presidency.  Prior to his presidential ambitions, Lincoln was a “vigorous member of the ‘Free Soil’ movement in American politics” whilst retaining his membership in the Whig Party.[1]  While the Free Soil movement opposed the expansion of slavery, its principles were not exclusively attractive to radical abolitionists but also whites who opposed slavery due to their own racial self-interest.  Lincoln, like other white Americans during the era, believed that Black Americans were racially inferior to themselves.  Thus, many racially prejudiced Americans opposed the expansion of slavery not for egalitarian reasons but instead as a way to increase the economic opportunities for members of their own race.  The notion that slavery was spreading West was not repulsive to the Free Soilers because of the nature of the institution inasmuch as the idea of Black Americans spreading to territories Free Soilers sought to be purely for whites.  This sentiment was explicitly pronounced in 1848 when the New York Barnburners, leaders within the Free Soil Party, outlined that their opposition to slavery’s expansion “was motivated solely by concern for the interests of white laborers, who would be ‘degraded’ by association with ‘the labor of the black race.’”[2]

Another key underpinning of the Free Soil movement was preventing the economic harm that slavery would render upon white Americans.  Slavery was a cheaper and more competitive source of labor compared to hiring white workers, even in professions outside of the typical agricultural role slaves are associated with.  This economic anxiety was exemplified when an iron works factory rented slaves at a cheaper rate per head to replace white laborers on strike for better wages and working conditions[3].  If slavery expanded to the West and beyond, many believed this could be reproduced across the territories where white laborers could seldom compete for work.  This problem directly impacted Lincoln and his family during his early life and the inability of white laborers to compete in the presence of slavery was one of the reasons that drove them to leave Kentucky and settle in Illinois.[4]

Thus, Lincoln entertained the prospect of colonization for Black people in Africa following their liberation.  While later Lincoln admitted that colonization would be logistically impossible, the idea of removing those of a perceived inferior race to prevent labor competition and securing the nation’s racial homogeneity proved particularly enticing.  The notion of colonization that Lincoln supported was especially controversial in the Black community during the era and caught the ire of Frederick Douglass, who despite having a close relationship with the president during the Civil War, still felt he was not entirely committed to racial equality.  When speaking before a committee of free black men where he advocated for freed Black colonization elsewhere in 1862, Douglass denounced Lincoln’s continued marketing of the idea because it “furnish(ed) a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of this country.”[5]  In turn, this would add onto the stigma of Black people labeled as “other” within their national boundaries.  This would further rouse sentiment charging African Americans as the cause of the rebellion, which “even Mr. Lincoln himself, must know quite well that the mere presence of the colored race could never have provoked this horrid and desolating rebellion.”[6] 

Douglass denounced colonization as an effort to deport freedmen to a continent with which they had no contact with for generations.  While at best colonization can be characterized as a well-meaning but misguided effort to repatriate slaves following the horrors of bondage, this colonization can also be perceived as a convenient plan to maintain America as a country for whites only.  In addition, many Black Americans “recognized that colonization was not intended to benefit them but to protect slavery by removing the destabilizing presence of free people of color.”[7]  This colonization plan that Lincoln advocated could be described less as a “solution, but an evasion” that skirted around the wrong of slavery with a deceptive policy that whites had more to gain from than Black Americans.[8]  Despite colonization having its share of advocates in the Black community such as Martin Delany and Edward Blyden, the policy that Lincoln supported was “not repentance but putting the wronged ones out of our presence;” as far as morality was concerned, it was clear that “if the American people could endure the Negro’s presence while a slave, they certainly can and ought to endure his presence as a free man.”[9]  This willingness to only accept Black people in America while in the chains of bondage but not as equal citizens made it easy for Lincoln as a matter of politics to support Black emigration publicly which would aid in making America more ethnically homogenous.

Even after the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln insisted upon colonization being the only solution for peace in a war-torn nation whose different races could not peaceably coexist with one another.  In August of 1862, Lincoln met with a group of free Black men in the White House to advocate for not only colonization again but also explicitly for the separation of the races which he considered would be to their mutual benefit.  During this meeting, in supporting the perceived benefits of what was essentially racial exclusion he stated “I think your race suffer(s) very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.”[10]  Douglass likened Lincoln’s ignorant misconception in 1862 regarding his view on American racial harmony being threatened by the presence of Black Americans to “a horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveler’s pocket is the first cause of his robbery.”[11] 

Despite running on the 1860 Republican ticket as the anti-slavery candidate, Lincoln’s continued support for colonization by Black Americans stemmed from his statements suggesting that their mere presence in America was the cause of the Civil War rather than the institution that forcibly brought them to America in the first place.  Although opposed to the perpetuation of slavery, Douglass condemned him for not taking any action in realizing this goal years into his term and the war.  Lincoln, instead of ending the institution that constituted the economic backbone of the rebellion, was “as timid as a sheep when required to live up to a single one of his anti-slavery testimonies.”[12]  He also deflected the blame for the war onto those who he sought to expel from the nation since the earliest days of his political career while simultaneously using disdain for slavery which forced Black Americans into America in the first place to assume the highest office in the land.

Opponents of the idea that Lincoln harbored racial prejudice point to his speeches and letters he wrote towards the latter half of his career but also frequently to the idea that Lincoln needed to be prudent in order to gain popular support.  However, Lincoln’s actions while in the Illinois legislature during the 1830s in bills he wrote or supported contradict the lofty ideals he would claim to uphold later in his career.  Despite Illinois being a free state which theoretically should have afforded equal rights and status to all citizens, Lincoln campaigned in 1836 on the promise of “all sharing the privileges of government, who assist in sharing its burthens” but specified “(going) for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).”[13]  In spite of Illinois’s free status, Lincoln campaigned on the implicit promise of marginalization of free Black Americans who lived in the state.  He was progressive enough to consider including women in the sacred right of suffrage but compromised the beliefs he would emphasize in later years regarding natural equality of rights, regardless of race. 

As a congressman, Lincoln voted against a resolution that condemned abolitionists and Congress’s action in abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia.  However, after the resolution was passed he inserted a written protest into the vote record along with other dissenters that mirrored the same argument Stephen Douglas used against him prior to his presidential ascension.  In the protest inserted into the record following the vote, Lincoln and the others in opposition declared Congressional action that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia “’ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people.’”[14]  Additionally, in describing slavery as being “founded on both injustice and bad policy,” Lincoln and the others who voted against the resolution condemned abolitionism in the same breath whose “doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its (slavery’s) evils.”[15]  Despite Lincoln’s condemnation of Douglas’s popular sovereignty plan for its potential to perpetuate an institution he declared morally abhorrent, he supported its application in deciding slavery’s fate in the nation’s capital.  Lincoln during his presidential campaign would question Douglass on whether he was truly neutral regarding slavery’s expansion via popular sovereignty, which he likely was not given his insistence on adhering to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott application of the 5th Amendment and still allowing states to reject slavery.  Regardless of whether he wholeheartedly agreed with the protest statement he and other legislators entered into record following the vote on the resolution, Douglas would likely have been overjoyed over his support for popular sovereignty’s ability to apply in the nation’s capital and maintain the institution he denounced.

Another law which was passed during Lincoln’s time in the state legislature and U.S. House of Representatives that illuminates the hypocrisy at the center of Lincoln’s beliefs was the enactment of what were known as “Black Laws.”  In Illinois, Black Laws perpetuated the political disenfranchisement of Black Americans in Illinois, broadly excluded Black Americans from public education while still paying taxes that funded it for whites, and outlawed free Black Americans from settling from beyond Illinois.  Lincoln was also complicit in repeatedly supporting the Illinois Black Codes, which allowed the state and private white citizens to “use violence to deny Black Americans the right to settle in the state.”[16]  This was condemned by the First Convention of the Colored Citizens of Illinois because this unequal application of Illinois law regarding settlement in the state which “’invite(s) all others to come freely into the State…and they shall be protected by your republican laws…but if any colored person shall come into the State…your legislators have seen fit to condemn such colored persons as having committed a high crime against the State.’”[17]

Lincoln’s weaponization of race against his political opponents earlier in his career was also another means by which he attempted to gain support for his and the Whig Party’s ambitions.  He later condemned Martin Van Buren’s vote during the New York Convention of 1821 to secure “’Negro suffrage with a property qualification’” in order to pursue a parity between black and white voting privileges.  In 1840, he went on to criticize Van Buren’s vote during a speech in Fremont, Illinois and later that year as a coeditor of The Old Soldier, a Whig campaign paper, participated in his party’s dog whistle racism against a notion he himself would claim to support later in life.  They described Van Buren in headlines that read “Hung be the Heavens with Black: A recent manifestation of Mr. Van Buren’s love for Free Negros” which decried Van Buren’s decision to allow free black men to testify against a Navy lieutenant during a court martial.[18]  Whigs went on to denounce him for allowing free Black Americans or slaves to testify against whites and, knowing that this sentiment would resound among voters they courted, asked “should not Mr. Van Buren be called the ‘NEGRO WITNESS’ candidate.”[19]  Lincoln and his allies within the Whig party sought to turn to defamation of their opponents on the basis of their efforts towards racial equality, despite Lincoln having a similar accusation levied against him by Douglass and other Democrats in the 1850s.  It is true that Lincoln repeatedly expressed his opposition to slavery’s existence publicly in the 1850s and mirrored Henry Clay’s moderate position on its eradication and how our founding principles ought to have applied to all, including Black Americans in America.[20]  However, despite “(finding) slavery to be immoral and (hoping) for its demise” and his professed dedication to upholding the rule of law vis-à-vis protecting the rights of citizens fairly, “he made no comparable moral argument against political and social exclusion on grounds of race.”[21]  Irony aside, it is difficult to reconcile Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator” with his overtly racist attacks on others for pursuing equal rights between the races in America, something he would later claim to pursue.  Conveniently using this tired trope in order to advance his and his party’s ambitions serves as another example where the “Great Emancipator” used inflammatory racial rhetoric to gain the support of his electorate.

Lincoln’s ability to use racial or anti-slavery sentiment whimsically when it best suited his audience did not end at commodifying the interests of Black Americans.  In the midst of his first term in the White House Lincoln authorized the execution of thirty-eight Dakota Sioux in Minnesota, which remains today the largest mass execution in American history.  Despite Lincoln being lauded for his compromise to reduce the number of executions from over three hundred convicted in deeply biased courts to “appease a Minnesota settler populace threatening riots and anarchy,” he used the lives of Native Americans as bargaining chips to pacify Minnesotans which ultimately resulted in one of the most heinous acts committed by the United States government.[22]  The outcome in which only one tenth of those condemned being executed as opposed to deferring to the bloodlust of the Minnesotan courts and populace is preferable, but it is still necessary to judge Lincoln “in light of the prevailing laws and moral principles, which were current in American society during the times in which they lived.”[23]  Within the 1806 Articles of War within the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the president has the ultimate power to authorize using capital punishment for those convicted in a court martial.  The court martial, which can be described as a “kangaroo court,” however, was improperly used to try these prisoners of war to convict them “’not for the crime of murder but for killings committed in warfare.’”[24]  Lincoln had the power to prevent these executions on the unjust basis by which these trials were held but instead sacrificed the lives of thirty-eight merely for the sake of placating Minnesotans.  While Lincoln minimized the number of killings that could have occurred and retained Minnesota’s allegiance during those chaotic years, one must ask, “but how many men can a president allow to be unjustly executed before he is held accountable?”[25]

However, there are other scholars who dispute Lincoln possessed any prejudiced attitude toward Native Americans similar to those reflected by Minnesotans and others on the frontier during the nineteenth century.  Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather was murdered by a Native American in front of his father and uncle when they were young boys and became a traumatic memory which was recounted to Lincoln many times during his formative years.  But as he “began his education, he encountered Native Americans again in a more institutionalized social setting” and spent time studying oppressed communities in America as to compare their plights, eventually coming to consider “Indians subjects of pity.”[26]  He personally had little to no contact with Native Americans until his enlistment in the Black Hawk War where he famously prevented his men from lynching a Native man they encountered on their mostly uneventful tour of duty.  However, empathetic towards Native Americans or not, Lincoln may have been politically cornered with the decision he needed to make with respect to the fate of the Sioux on trial following the Minnesota conflict and the panic it sparked in among whites.  With entire counties evacuated and unreliable intelligence regarding Sioux military strength, when the short-lived uprising was crushed many “Minnesotans were to contemplate, and demand, the vengeful execution of 300 more Sioux men.”[27]  Upon sensing Lincoln’s vacillation on approving these executions, both the commander of the force he sent to Minnesota as well as its governor warned that a failure to approve the executions would result in mass, indiscriminate killings of Natives in the region by the citizenry. 

Despite the empathy Lincoln formed for Native Americans as a young man, his respect for the rights of the few individual Natives he interacted with through his life did not also transfer to their collective society.  In 1859 he justified the dispossession of the California territory from its Native inhabitants due to the gold in the region its inhabitants failed to notice, which was explainable by the “American habits of observation, innovation and experimentation” that separated Americans from Europeans and Californians.[28]  Again, Lincoln’s supposed more egalitarian views regarding race were cast aside when the prospect of acquiring additional territory, resources and subsequent political clout came into question.  With an abundance of gold within reach, Lincoln remained keen on taking advantage of the territory’s wealth and “viewed the Native American presence in the West as a foreign one that would be eventually overcome.”[29]

Lincoln’s earliest known opinions regarding race and his purported view of Native Americans are lauded for being much more progressive relative to his contemporaries during the era in which he lived.  Regardless, his decision to allow thirty-eight executions was unprecedented and remains unmatched in the case of the Sioux who were tried in military courts as prisoners of war with little evidence to sentence combatants to death.  While it is true that simultaneously the other two hundred and sixty five who were pardoned is the largest instance of mass clemency in our history, it remains shameful that the others who were not as fortunate needed to be sacrificed by Lincoln in order to appease Minnesotans who threatened mob rule if their bloodlust was not satisfied by the state.  This in of itself is a contradiction of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address he gave over twenty years prior where he denounced “mobocratic” spirit which he condemned over its disdain for the rule of law but, for the sake of expediency in the Minnesota conflict, he acquiesced nonetheless.[30]  The prospect of three hundred deaths would have far outweighed what the eventual outcome was in the Sioux executions, it should still be noted that Lincoln’s decision had been “ad hoc rather than the result of coherent policy” pertaining to either Native American affairs or executive power.[31]  Amidst the dichotomy of opinions urging Lincoln towards one course of action over another during this crisis, perhaps Lincoln should have heeded Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple of Minnesota when he wrote to him “the leaders must be punished but we cannot afford by any wanton cruelty to purchase a long Indian war—nor by injustice in other matters purchase the anger of God.”[32]

For those who praise Lincoln as progressive and pragmatic regarding race and slavery, one needs only to look at his long record of contradictory statements and actions over the course of his life.  It is difficult to square the image of the “Great Emancipator” with the man who encouraged Black colonization to racially homogenize America and sidestep equally applying legal protections for them as citizens following emancipation, in spite of his other statements describing how the principles outlined in America’s founding also applied to Black Americans.  He idly stood by as racially discriminatory laws were enacted while he was in the Illinois legislature and along with other Whigs accused political opponents of sympathizing with the notion of racial equality for the purpose of gaining electoral support.  He sympathized with the plight of the oppressed peoples in America who he still did not believe were equal to him “in all respects,” but he would sacrifice their interests before his own or the Union’s as seen in his continued support for gradual emancipation or allowing thirty-eight to die in Minnesota to refocus on the southern rebellion.  Over the course of his career, the price for his political pragmatism as he ascended to the White House was the cost of elevating African Americans and other ethnic minorities from bondage or arguing for their complete and unconditional equality with the white man. 

[1] Striner, Richard. “Lincoln and Race.” Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Page 3.

[2] Foner, Eric. “Politics and Prejudice: The Free Soil Party and the Negro, 1849-1852.” The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (1965): https://doi.org/10.2307/2716247. Page 239.

[3] Striner, “Lincoln and Race.” Page 5.

[4] Neely, Mark E. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.01941Page 3

[5] Douglass, Frederick. “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: The President and His Speeches.” Douglass Monthly, September 1862. River Campus Libraries. University of Rochester. Accessed March 6, 2020. https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4387.

[6] Douglass, Frederick. “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: The President and His Speeches.”

[7] Hudson, J. Blaine. “Abraham Lincoln: An African American Perspective.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 106, no. ¾ (2008): 513-35. Accessed March 6, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/23388015. Page 523.

[8] Douglass, Frederick. “The Folly of Colonization.” In African American Social and Political Thought 1850-1920, edited by Howard Brotz, 328, 331. Newark: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Page 330.

[9] Brotz, Howard, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought 1850-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ, etc., NJ: Transaction, 1992). Pages 38, 112, 330-331

[10] Hudson, J. Blaine. “Abraham Lincoln: An African American Perspective.” Page 524.

[11] Douglass, Frederick. “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: The President and His Speeches.”

[12] Douglass, Frederick. “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: The President and His Speeches.”

[13] Neely, Mark E. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Page 12.

[14] Neely, Mark E. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Page 15.

[15] Neely, Mark E. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Page 15.

[16] Bennett Jr., Lerone. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2007. Page 197.

[17] Bennett Jr., Lerone. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Page 196.

[18] Bennett Jr., Lerone. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream Page 206.

[19] Bennett Jr., Lerone. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Page 206.

[20] Fredrickson, George M. “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free White Men: The Illinois Years.” In Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race, 43–84. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0gc1.5. Page 56

[21] Fredrickson, George M. “Free Soil, Free Labor and Free White Men: The Illinois Years.” Page 64

[22] Martinez, David. “Remembering the Thirty-Eight: Abraham Lincoln, the Dakota and the U.S. War on Barbarism.” Wicazo Sa Review 28, no. 2 (2013): 5-29.  Accessed March 6, 2020. doi:10.5749/wicazosareview.28.2.0005. Page 6.

[23] Martinez, David. “Remembering the Thirty-Eight: Abraham Lincoln, the Dakota and the U.S. War on Barbarism.” Page 9.

[24] Martinez, David. “Remembering the Thirty-Eight: Abraham Lincoln, the Dakota and the U.S. War on Barbarism.” Page 11-12.

[25] Martinez, David. “Remembering the Thirty-Eight: Abraham Lincoln, the Dakota and the U.S. War on Barbarism.” Page 13.

[26] Anderson, Christopher W. “Native Americans and the Origin of Abraham Lincoln’s Views on Race.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 37, no. 1 (2016): Accessed April 11, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/26290263. Page 15.

[27] Nichols, David A. “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians.” Minnesota History 44, no. 1 (1974): 2-15. Accessed April 12, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/20178286.

[28] Anderson, Christopher W. “Native Americans and the Origin of Abraham Lincoln’s Views on Race.” Page 24.

[29] Anderson, Christopher W. “Native Americans and the Origin of Abraham Lincoln’s Views on Race.” Page 25

[30] Basler, Roy P. Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. Page 76-85

[31] Nichols, David A. “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians.” Page 11

[32] Nichols, David A. “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians.” Page 9

Bibliography

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Basler, Roy P. Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. Cleveland, Ohio: Da Capo Press, 2001.

Bennett, Lerone. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Pub. Co., 2007.

Brotz, Howard, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought 1850-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ, etc., NJ: Transaction, 1992). Pages 38, 112, 330-331

Douglass, Frederick. “The Folly of Colonization.” In African American Social and Political Thought 1850-1920, edited by Howard Brotz, 328-331.  Newark: Transaction Publishers, 2009

Douglass, Frederick. “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: The President and His Speeches.” River Campus Libraries. University of Rochester. Accessed March 6, 2020. https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4387.

Fredrickson, George M. “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free White Men: The Illinois Years.” In Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race, 43–84. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x0gc1.5.

Foner, Eric. “Politics and Prejudice: The Free Soil Party and the Negro, 1849-1852.” The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 4 (1965): https://doi.org/10.2307/2716247.

Hudson, J. Blaine. “Abraham Lincoln: An African American Perspective.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 106, no. 3/4 (2008): 513-35. Accessed March 6, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/23388015.

Martínez, David. “Remembering the Thirty-Eight: Abraham Lincoln, the Dakota, and the U.S. War on Barbarism.” Wicazo Sa Review28, no. 2 (2013): 5-29. Accessed March 6, 2020. doi:10.5749/wicazosareview.28.2.0005

Nichols, David A. “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians.” Minnesota History 44, no. 1 (1974): 2-15. Accessed April 12, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/20178286.

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Sturdevant, Katherine Scott, and Stephen Collins. “Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln on Black Equity in the Civil War: A Historical-Rhetorical Perspective.” Black History Bulletin 73, no. 2 (2010): 8-15. Accessed January 29, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24759680.

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Zilversmit, Arthur. “Lincoln and the Problem of Race: A Decade of Interpretations.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, vol. 2, no. 1, 1980, pp. 22–45. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0002.104/–lincoln-and-the-problem-of-race-a-decade-of-interpretations?rgn=main;view=fulltext