I would urge all who have enjoyed [Lerone Bennett, Jr.]'s masterful text, Before the Mayflower, to read his new book, Forced Into Glory, which deals with the presidency and life of the "Great Emancipator", [Abraham Lincoln]. Forced Into Glory is a work of true scholarship which exposes a myth which has been cleverly concealed by well-meaning white scholars over the past century. Bennett reveals another side of one of America's most revered Presidents. He describes Lincoln's continuing support of "Black Codes" during Lincoln's legislative career in Illinois and the path he took, beginning in 1836, when he gave his support to the taxation of Blacks to pay for White schools, until 1855 when he led a movement to start a Black separate school in Springfield. Bennett points out that in 1849 Lincoln voted against an anti-slave trade resolution in the Congress and notes Lincoln's active support of the oppressive 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Bennett also tells of Lincoln's call, in 1852, for compensated emancipation and the deportation of all Blacks in a draft of a Constitutional Amendment The author tells us that in 1854, and again in 1860, Lincoln contended that the Negro race was inferior to the White race, and in 1858 he confessed that slavery had always been a "minor question" to him until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which produced "Bleeding Kansas." Bennett also describes Lincoln's hatred of miscegenation, or "Amalgamation" as he called it. On August 18, 1863, the Reverend James Mitchell, Lincoln's Immigration Aide, asked him if he, "might say that colonization was still the policy of this Administration." Lincoln replied, "I have never thought so much on a subject and arrived at a conclusion so definite as I have in this case and after these many years found myself SO WRONG." He added "It would have been much better to separate the races than to have such scenes as those now taking place in New York, where Negroes are being hanged on lamp posts."
