You can’t hold people of the part to today’s standards. Lincoln said things which would be considered as vile racism today yet he wasn’t.
Correction: People of the past. Your spell checker won’t catch the wrong word if is another word spelled correctly.
Ty Cobb is another who has been unfairly treated by history.
Things like opening the first negro hospital in the Atlanta area and staffing it with black doctors at a time when blacks were being turned away at other hospitals. He was meanspirited in personal relationships and especially disliked the press and the press used their power against him.
Lincoln said things which would be considered as vile racism today yet he wasn’t.
Really?
“On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln published the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves would be set free...in the 10 states of the Confederation which were “in rebellion against the United States.” The slaves in the states that, willingly or unwillingly, were not part of the Confederacy, such as Kentucky, Maryland, or Delaware, were to remain in chains. The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation was so blatant that even Lincoln’s loyal secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically observed, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”
Lincoln - “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Granted, he was a product of his times, but if his beliefs weren’t racist, what would would qualify as racist?