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The proper context is that Lincoln didn't care one whit about the slaves - he just wanted to keep the union together.
OK, which is why the South seceded before he took office, because Lincoln didn't care about slaves and would do nothing to slow or stop the spread of slavery after he was elected.... Dang, it's too bad you weren't around in that era and you could have told the South that their slave based economy was perfectly safe under Lincoln!
Lincoln thought slavery should not exist, but he did not view blacks as equal to whites. If he could have kept the union together and not freed one slave - he would have been a happy camper.
Here's more "history" for you. Lincoln:
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government — that nation — of which that constitution was the organic law.
It's pretty clear - he was personally opposed to slavery, but acknowledged his oath was to preserve the Union. Your attempts to make that into a negative are laughable.
Those quotes do not back up your assessment that if the average Southerner stayed living in the South that they must have supported racism. I pointed out to you how silly that claim is by citing the Detroit equivalent.
It's not just the quotes, but that those leaders were elected to represent them, in every office from the highest to the lowest.
People can't up and move on a whim, especially poor people. If they have a little bit of land - that's they way they make their living.
What did you expect them to do? Leave everything they owned and become beggars in the streets in the North?
I'm really curious to see how you defend that claim because from where I sit - it's ludicrous.
I assume you mean white people can't just up and move, which is true. But they CAN vote and did vote and they consistently across every elected office from the highest to the lowest for almost a century elected white supremacists who supported Jim Crow and segregation. It's impossible to conclude the average white voter in those states opposed policies imposed at every level by leaders they ELECTED.
It's incredible how reluctant you are to even acknowledge what is the history of this region. You're engaged in a rewrite of what happened to blacks, with the support of the vast majority of the white population (at least those with any power) for nearly a century. No wonder you don't see a problem with a flag that represented that era, as you don't see the era as particularly troubling. A few bad apples.....