Historian Eric Foner has suggested that both fans and critics of Abraham Lincoln consider the possibility that Lincoln maintained a racial attitude guided by white supremist beliefs while he simultaneously opposed slavery on humanitarian grounds.  Indeed, the efforts of historians to paint Lincoln in tones of black and white, as either a trailblazer of racial equality or as the quintessential racist, have led over a hundred years of Lincoln scholarship to an impasse.  As long as the pendulum swings historians continue to miss the mark, and Lincoln's racial beliefs remain an enigma.  People may be reluctant to confront an ugly truth about Lincoln, not that he was, necessarily, the ultimate racist, but that his thoughts on race were not unique, that they were in fact the thoughts shared by most Northerners at the time.  In this sense he ceases to be the visionary we have thought him, and his racial beliefs reveal themselves to be nothing special.

     This project examines Lincoln's beliefs on another race, the American Indians, with the expectation that Foner's suggestion will resonate here as well; it is my hypothesis that Lincoln considered American Indians to be uncivilized savages who were inferior to whites, yet often sympathized with them when he considered their treatment inhumane.  The circumstances of the Civil War afforded Lincoln political excuses for abolishing slavery, but unfortunately no set of circumstances made it politically lucrative for him to sublimate his expansionist views in favor of a more respectable policy toward the Indians.  In this sense Lincoln's vision for America was indeed, as Lerone Bennett Jr.'s title suggests, a "white dream."

          What were Abraham Lincoln's thoughts about American Indians as a race and about
     their relocation and/or extermination?

• How did Lincoln's involvement in the Black Hawk War shape or change his ideas about American Indians?
• Where did American Indians fit, if at all, into Lincoln's picture of westward expansion?
• Did Lincoln draw parallels or distinctions (or both) between American Indians and African slaves? What were they?
• In regard to blacks, Lincoln's preferred policy was to colonize them in Liberia or Central America, but what Indian policy, if any, did he prefer? 

Nichols, David A. Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics. 
        Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. 

        The most significant work on Lincoln’s Indian policy, Nichols’ book effectively portrays a complex and corrupt Indian system, the dynamics of which were set up to benefit its self-interested agents more than the Indians themselves.  With swindle, theft, and other abuses of office rampant, the “machine” bestowed upon Lincoln proved itself resistant to reform, and Lincoln’s best efforts were thwarted both by corruption and by the distractions and imperatives of the Civil War.  That is not to say that Lincoln ambitiously pursued reform from the start; in Nichols’ account, it was not until the Dakota Conflict of 1862 that Lincoln acknowledged the necessity of reform.  The requirement of executive approval for the executions of Dakota rebels forced a reluctant Lincoln to deal intimately with Indian affairs on an unprecedented level.  Lincoln’s efforts to crack down on the system only further hurt the Indians, as policies underscored by white supremist beliefs and desires for westward expansion only further removed, decimated, and impoverished Indian tribes.  Indian affairs in general remained problematic by virtue of Lincoln's own conflicting ideas; he aimed at once to remove the Indians from territory desired for the settlement of whites yet also to provide for their welfare and assimilation into white culture.  In Nichols' final analysis, therefore, Lincoln left the Indian System no better than he had found it.