
IF Abraham Lincoln were alive today and publicly expressed today some of the views on race he repeatedly expressed in the nineteenth century, not only would he be unable to win elective office anywhere in the land, even in the smallest of municipalities, he would almost certainly be unable to secure a job in corporations, law firms or academia. Maybe he could live in a log cabin and hunt for squirrels.
In his speech on June 26, 1857 in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln said, referring to intermarriage between blacks and whites:
A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation; but as immediate separate is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together…. Such separation, if it is ever to be effected at all, must be effect by colonization [of blacks in Africa] … The enterprise is a difficult one; but ‘when there is a will there is a way;’ and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be. The children of Israel, to such numbers as to include four hundred thousand fighting men, went out of Egyptian bondage in a body.
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