The official Democratic Party account tweeted (then deleted) a post calling a firework display at Mount Rushmore on the 4th"a rally glorifying white supremacy." Okay, maybe Jefferson, a slave owner might fit, but not the President who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The only thing those four faces have in common is that they are white.
My impression is that Lincoln was an unambiguous white supremacist before the war, but his views evolved into something like a combination of the belief that whites were generally more intelligent than blacks, but members of the two races had identical moral value as human beings.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm wrong. I'm sure you know a lot more about Lincoln than I do and can correct me if I'm mistaken.
Republicans before the War were careful to emphasize legal equality, not social equality to be electable. Democrats were always insisting that Republicans wanted black men marrying white women. Lincoln remained certain of black intellectual inferiority as did many abolitionists, hence Lincoln's enthusiasm for sending them West or to Africa where competition with whites would not be so destructive.
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