Deportation or integration. The Black Dilemmas of Lincoln

This article discusses the evolution of Abraham Lincoln's position concerning slave emancipation in the United States. His thinking underwent a transition from colonization, under which freed blacks would be deported from American territory after emancipation, to integration, under which former slaves and freedmen would be assimilated as partial citizens in the American polity. Three important elements in this transition were Lincoln's Whig origins, the debate over free soil, and Presidential politics during the Civil War. In the following pages I review the main arguments in these American historiographic debates from the standpoint of their influence on the 16th American President.