It is useful to contrast Lincoln's concept of citizenship, which is a rhetorically reductionist one, with the history of the concept as recounted by Taney.
The Constitution certainly never considered negroes as citizen material, although the concept of citizenship as between federal and states was hardly uniform.
Certainly Lincoln, despite his 1858 campaign rhetoric, and the Republican abolitionist platform, himself never considered negroes citizenship material, as shown by his later remarks and recorded activities, especially his meeting in the White House with free negro representatives regarding transportation. See Foner, and other posts here.
Although he vigorously espoused equality and citizenship for all men based on the Declaration, such concepts never made it into the Constitution, and in fact as Taney pointed out, an obvious fact known to all at the time, never intended by their authors to extend to the kind of position for negroes which Lincoln and the abolitionists espoused.
Lincoln's attack on Dred Scott was intentionally misguiding and disingenuous, in that Dred Scott had already been Congressionally repealed by Kansas Nebraska, a bill Douglas himself had drafted.
In many of these matters, the First Lincoln Douglas Debate, Holzer's unexpurgated version, is very illuminating, but only an introduction of sorts. I have posted other material and my arguments.
Lincoln's available prior speeches are most illuminating, including one claimed to have been lost, as well as the original Republican Platform, Springfield I believe. It is also useful to read his law partner's memoirs, himself a devout abolitionist.
Lincoln's meeting in the White House, see post here, is what I consider the stake in the heart of Foner's theory of the gradual transformation of Lincoln into an abolitionist and a radical Republican.
Lincoln was a Republican Party Abolitionist Conspirator of Convenience.
He never himself actually believed, either early or late, in Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence racial or humanity-wide equality, racial mixing, equal or full citizenship for subordinate races. He adopted this stance for purely political advantage purposes for himself.
He was perfectly willing to use the conspiracy, and the abolitionist backed Republican party on the one hand, and the anti abolitionist electorate of the North and of Illinois, on the other, for his own personal political advancement the entire time.
No other explanation, frankly, makes any sense and is also consistent with his role from 1854 forward.
Foner's interpretation is frankly ridiculous.
He was even willing to use the negroes he had freed as cannon fodder, without for a moment considering them equals, or favoring their continued presence here or even nearby.
There was plenty of almost vacant land in the West he might have suggested they be sent to, not as a foreign nation like the Indians, but as a subordinate race to be resettled elsewhere.
He failed to do that. One reason may be that he knew that open frontier borders would have leeched negroes all over the West had he done so.
He did not make a move in that direction as far as I know.
There have been only two other great power political radicals since the French Revolution, in the Age of the Democratic Revolutions. They are Adolf Hitler and V I Lenin.
Had Lincoln not been assassinated, one can only wonder at what other enormities he might have been able to accomplish.
My own view is that states' rights and states' sovereignties, over against the federal government, which had been the rule contemplated by the Constitution text and by most of its framers, and which survived the Civil War mostly intact, even with all the unconstitutionalities of the Radical Republicans and Reconstruction that followed, would then have been terminated by Lincoln with extreme prejudice, had he survived. Trust me.
He was already moving in that direction against Northern states which disobeyed his wishes regarding slavery or anything else.
This post is dedicated to Hannah Arendt. I cannot think of anyone else in modern history.
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