Abraham Lincoln was not a racist person, yet under politics and pressure from the majority of the white population, he was perceived as discriminatory. Abraham Lincoln always gave the people what they desired and wanted to hear even if it meant pushing away his own views. He hated slavery and believed that all men were created equal, including black people, as stated in the US Constitution. Yet in order to please the citizens, he was forced to contradict both that whites were superior to blacks and that blacks where the white's equal to different groups of people. .
Lincoln knew that white citizens looked down on Negroes, thinking they were superior intellectually, and in general. Lincoln himself once stated in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas, "I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position, (Speech at Ottawa, IL, August 21, 1858)" Yet this was only a scheme to gain the public's trust, for in another speech told before this, " let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man- this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position-discarding our standard that we have left us. (Speech at Chicago, IL, July 10, 1858)" Though Lincoln himself would have supported this last quotation, he never went public with his views. He put the American people above himself, for if he had not, the nation would have been torn apart. His hatred for slavery began at an early age, "When Lincoln went with his companions to a slave market they saw a handsome mulatto girl being sold on a block, and "the iron entered his soul"; he swore that if he ever got the chance he would hit slavery "and hit it hard" (Hofstader, 138). This quotation clearly shows Lincoln's deep hatred of slavery and that he was intelligent enough to hide this resentment to show the American people he was not bias toward a particular view.
