Guide to the Most (and Least) Politically Diverse Colleges,

[cobrat]

That is a bit of revisionist history.Lincoln was anti-slavery but he did not believe in the equality of the races. If he would be horrified at the modern Republic party, it would be that they had black men in a serious run for the presidency in the last few election cycles.

Actually, you’re the one engaging in a bit of revisionist history…especially by omitting the fact Lincoln’s views on race and racial equality evolved to the point he came around later in his life.

To illustrate this, he wrote the following sometime in the 1850’s…well before he ran for office and became President:

: “If A can prove… that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? –You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? –You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:264?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

While taken for granted today by most reasonable people, the expression of racial equality above was extremely radical for the time even among some of the more mainstream “polite” abolitionists of the era.

From his own writings, one can understand why many White southerners…overwhelmingly conservative Southern Democrats of that era in particular STRONGLY SUSPECTED him of abolitionist sympathies and thus, felt the need to influence their respective states to secede from the union to preserve their “states rights” to own and maintain slaves as personal property and to have that right protected by laws which cover protection of other forms of personal property once he was elected president.