In the 1858 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Douglas was a vocal proponent of white supremacy, and he was Illinois’ proslavery candidate. Abraham Lincoln did not advocate black and white equality, but he was Illinois’ antislavery candidate. Douglas won the election, but two years later the political climate had changed. In 1860, when Lincoln was the Republican Party’s candidate for president, he was, essentially, the same candidate he had been during his campaign for the Senate. He was still opposed to slavery, and he still did not embrace racial equality. This time, however, the party with the antislavery platform won the election.
Throughout his lifetime, Lincoln had contemporaries who were more radical on the question of race than he was, and he had contemporaries who were more conservative. Lincoln enjoyed meaningful personal and professional connections with individual black people, yet it took four years of bloody Civil War to begin to change his attitudes about the possibilities for black freedom and equality. Did these attitudes make Lincoln a racist? Or do they reveal complexities in his character?
If we employ our modern definitions of race and racism, we cannot see the complexities of Lincoln’s character and we cannot examine the contradictions within the man. If we dismiss Lincoln as a racist, then that is the end of the story because he was no different from the proslavery Douglas, for example, and there is no point in investigating the matter any further.
It is important to remember that human beings — in the present as well as in the past — are flawed, complicated and contradictory.
Lincoln was not immune from the complexities of human nature. In the end, the limitations of Lincoln’s own racial perspectives were an indictment of the larger society.
Much of American history was not pretty, but the complexities and the contradictions of the various historical experiences of the human condition provide a much more truthful picture of our racist past than does boiling down the details into one word with which we are only beginning to come to grips.
https://www.nprillinois.org/statehouse/2004-02-01/lincoln-race-the-great-emancipator-didnt-advocate-racial-equality-but-was-he-a-racist