The upcoming issue of The New York Review of Books (to my mind the best journal in the country) 
has an essay/review by the incomparable Garry Wills of Lincoln on Race and Slavery, edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and coedited by Donald Yacovone. The book is touted as a collection of all of Abraham Lincoln's writings on race.
There has been recurrent work done on Lincoln and race and his stance on slavery, and like most historical perspectives that have become part of the national fabric, the reality of Lincoln on race is much more nuanced and volatile than the myth. Wills zeroes in on Lincoln's economic, rather than moral, argument for ending slavery. Part of it sounds pre-Marxist, arguing that the slaves had a right to the fruit of their own labor. But Lincoln also believed that slavery hurt white laborers by driving down wages and giving slave-owners an unfair economic advantage:
There's much more to the essay, obviously, and I encourage you to click through to it (and for that matter, to subscribe). It's a thought-provoking essay, and gets at a point I make repeatedly to my journalism students: Always question how you know what you think you know. And then start peeling back the layers.
has an essay/review by the incomparable Garry Wills of Lincoln on Race and Slavery, edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and coedited by Donald Yacovone. The book is touted as a collection of all of Abraham Lincoln's writings on race.There has been recurrent work done on Lincoln and race and his stance on slavery, and like most historical perspectives that have become part of the national fabric, the reality of Lincoln on race is much more nuanced and volatile than the myth. Wills zeroes in on Lincoln's economic, rather than moral, argument for ending slavery. Part of it sounds pre-Marxist, arguing that the slaves had a right to the fruit of their own labor. But Lincoln also believed that slavery hurt white laborers by driving down wages and giving slave-owners an unfair economic advantage:
"So deep was Lincoln's belief in a free market of labor that he condemned slavery for impinging on the free whites' right to the fruits of their work. The slave owners' profits from the unrequited toil of their slaves gave them an advantage over those who paid their workers, making the latter less competitive than they would otherwise be. One of the reasons Lincoln wanted to keep slavery from the territories was to protect the opportunities of free white workers (another was to decrease opportunities for miscegenation). Speaking at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1856, he said that the territories "should be kept open for the homes of free white people." Even his cherished plan of sending freed blacks to Liberia was looked at from the economic vantage of free white labor. In his 1862 annual address to Congress, he said: "With deportation, even to a limited extent, enhanced wages to white labor is mathematically certain."
There's much more to the essay, obviously, and I encourage you to click through to it (and for that matter, to subscribe). It's a thought-provoking essay, and gets at a point I make repeatedly to my journalism students: Always question how you know what you think you know. And then start peeling back the layers.