Lincoln as Abolitionist (5)

I don't think we can accurately say that Lincoln's comments in 1858 were simply attempts to shoot down the Democrats' attempts to divert the issue from the key dispute over "popular sovereignty" and containing the spread of slavery. While his comments quoted in the earlier posts were intended to do that, I also don't know of any reason to think that the future Great Emancipator was misrepresenting his own views.

So I'm going to touch quickly on a view general points about the American view of race in the pre-Civil War years. It's important to remember that ideas on race were shifting drastically, probably much more so than in the years since the Second World War. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., points out in The Disuniting of America (1991):

The word race as used in the 18th and 19th centuries generally meant what we mean by nationality today; thus people spoke of "the English race," "the German race," and so on. What, [French writer] Crèvecoeur mused [in the 18th century], were the characteristics of this suddenly emergent American race?

The late Stephen Jay Gould (The Geometer of Race Discover Nov. 1994) credited the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) as the scientist who first divided humanity into four basic subgroups:

Linnaeus divided the species Homo sapiens into four basic varieties, defined primarily by geography and, interestingly, not in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition - Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Afer, or African. ... In so doing, Linnaeus presented nothing original; he merely mapped humans onto the four geographic regions of conventional cartography.