Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream

This video was an interview based on Lerone Bennett Jr.’s book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. This interview was conducted because the book caused controversy. It supposedly detested everything that anyone was ever taught about Abraham Lincoln and his presidency. Bennett says that his book’s main points were that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free blacks, Lincoln was racist, he wanted to deport blacks, and that Lincoln was the total opposite to what all historians portray him to be. In this paper, I will tell what I learned, and my point of view.
From personal experience, what is taught in school about Abraham Lincoln is that he freed the slaves, loved blacks, and that white people hated him for that. In the back of my mind I always believed that Lincoln was never for blacks. I was under the impression that he only freed slaves to prove
If Lincoln loved blacks as much as history portrays, why did he have slaves? This is why it was a belief of mine that Lincoln only wanted to prove his power to the Confederacy. At any given moment, if Lincoln was “anti-slavery”, he could have fought to free those slaves. Instead, he was two faced, and had certain slaves freed only to send them away to foreign land. I now view Lincoln’s presidency similar to the way John Adams viewed the Gag Rule, which forbade slavery topics. It was based solely on the right to freedom of speech (First Amendment). As mentioned in class today, just because Adams repealed the Gag Rule did not mean that he was not racist. As for Lincoln, just because he participated in the freeing of slaves, does not mean that he wasn’t a racist. It could be possible that he wanted an all-white nation, but his plan to make the country all white just backfired and ended up with a country full of free blacks and upset white