The sickening historical lie that Abraham Lincoln wasn't interested in abolishing black slavery.

[JHan]

4. Unfortunately , by even those standards, he was considered liberal for his time.

.. because he believed Slavery to be immoral. That said, his solution was not to integrate Slaves into the American project, but to send them to Africa to establish their own colonies.

Lincoln may be remembered as the Great Emancipator, but his views on slavery and race were not as simple as his contemporary reputation. To be sure, as Fredrickson makes clear, he was always adamant in his opposition to slavery: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Yet he was not an abolitionist. Far from it. As much as he hated slavery, he revered the Union, the Constitution and the law more. He would stand on principle in opposing the extension of slavery into the territories (even to the point of arguing against Stephen Douglas’s democratic solution of letting the people in the territories settle the question for themselves). But he would do nothing to undermine the Peculiar Institution where it was already legal, hoping instead that it would die a natural death sometime in the future. This is a stand that will not sit well with those modern readers who prefer luxuriating in the purity of their ideals (especially if those ideals don’t cost them anything) rather than trying to understand the difficult compromises a pragmatic politician is forced to make. But in Lincoln’s day a refusal to compromise led to the terrorism of John Brown — just as in our own time it leads to other kinds of fanaticism.

More problematic were Lincoln’s views on race. He held opinions not very different from those of the majority of his racist countrymen. Even if slavery was wrong, “there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.” His solution was a form of ethnic cleansing: shipping blacks off to Liberia, or Haiti, or Central America — anywhere as long as it wasn’t the United States.

Lincoln’s views may have started to change once he saw how bravely black troops fought for the Union cause, but even at the time of his death, he was willing to leave the fate of emancipated slaves in the hands of bigoted state legislators. “Whether Lincoln ever went beyond being an anti-slavery white supremacist,” Fredrickson writes, “is a question that is difficult to resolve.”

And Lincoln wasn't the only one who was problematic: if you delve deep into the writings of Abolitionists they were frequently racist. At the very least, they were patronizing: just one example - the tension between Douglass and the Garrisonians, where Douglass' views on Northern racism weren't welcome on Anti-Slavery platforms.

"In 1870 Thomas Burnett Pugh, an ardent abolitionist prior to the Civil War, invited Frederick Douglass to participate in the “Star Course” lecture series he had organized at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. However, Douglass “learned with some surprise considering our recently improved civilization, that in servile deference to a vulgar and senseless prejudice against my long abused and proscribed people, the Directors of that popular Hall persist in refusing to allow it to be used for a lecture to which my race shall be admitted on terms of equality with others.” In this strongly worded letter refusing the speaking engagement, Douglass conveyed his disgust not only with the academy’s policy but also at the “intensity of [Philadelphia’s] wolfish hate and snobbish pride of race.”

Fast forward to Teddy Roosevelt, considered fairly "liberal" even though pro-Eugenicist, who believed it was the job of the white man to help "lesser races". Roosevelt and his political allies believed that whites had "innate" superiority, and it was the responsibility of the white man to lift "lesser races" up to the standard of white men. He was close friends with Madison Grant:

[i]Grant has been pushed to the margins of environmentalism’s history, however. He is often remembered for another reason: his 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” a pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism that warns of the decline of the “Nordic” peoples. In Grant’s racial theory, Nordics were a natural aristocracy, marked by noble, generous instincts and a gift for political self-governance, who were being overtaken by the “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” populations. His work influenced the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and Africa and banned migrants from the Middle East and Asia. Adolf Hitler wrote Grant an admiring letter, calling the book “my Bible,” which has given it permanent status on the ultra-right. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who killed sixty-nine young Labour Party members, in 2011, drew on Grant’s racial theory in his own manifesto.

Grant’s fellow conservationists supported his racist activism. Roosevelt wrote Grant a letter praising “The Passing of the Great Race,” which appeared as a blurb on later editions, calling it “a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, who headed the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History (and, as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, named the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor), wrote a foreword to the book. Osborn argued that “conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country.”

For Grant, Roosevelt, and other architects of the country’s parks and game refuges, wild nature was worth saving for its aristocratic qualities; where these were lacking, they were indifferent. Grant, as his Times obituary noted, “was uninterested in the smaller forms of animal or bird life.” He wrote about the moose, the mountain goat, and the redwood tree, whose nobility and need for protection in a venal world so resembled the plight of Grant’s “Nordics” that his biographer, Jonathan Spiro, concludes that he saw them as two faces of a single threatened, declining aristocracy. Similarly, Roosevelt, in his accounts of hunting, could not say enough about the “lordly” and “noble” elk and buffalo that he and Grant helped to preserve and loved to kill. Their preservation work aimed to keep alive this kind of encounter between would-be aristocratic men and halfway wild nature."

And we can go on and on, analyzing other Presidents who followed...

What I take from all this is: History is complicated.

Lincoln's Civil War was necessary, he was on the right side of History. For that, I am prepared to give him some room, and I'm wary of indulging in presentism where we apply our own standards to flawed people who did great things but had other moral failings which were typical at the time.

What guides me is systemic change ( taking the individual out of it) The problem today is an obsession with individuals as mythical heroes who did no wrong. Wouldn't it be better for schools to teach both the good and the bad, where they too often ignore the bad to keep certain myths alive to avoid conflicted/complicated discussion?

Another reason I give Lincoln room is because Confederate sentiment is now perfectly aligned with the alt-right and "nazis", and much of the critique of Lincoln is used to serve up historical revisionism- to strip Civil War History of the moral outrage which brought it about by suggesting Lincoln didn't really want to free the slaves and was against "states rights".