Editing Talk:John Wilkes Booth/@comment-38.114.202.226-20140513154322/@comment-92.15.129.110-20140515150234 (section)

<span style="font-family:'HelveticaNeue',Helvetica,Arial,san-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:16.25px;">You're referring, of course, to one or two quotes from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, used by anti-Lincoln writers to show his "racism". Well, he might not match up to what we would expect of a leader today -- but he was actually FAR ahead of most in his day. He also DID believe that slavery was absolutely morally WRONG -- a wrong against fellow HUMAN BEINGS, and he argued repeatedly, from at least 1854 on, that the rights referred to in the Declaration DO belong to blacks as well. He showed NO animosity toward them. And by the end of his Presidency clearly regarded many quite highly (even suggesting that at least the educated ones, and those who had fought, deserved to be citzens [Booth's hearing Lincoln say this was apparently the 'final straw' that pushed him from his kidnapping plan to one of assassination.]) </span>
<span style="font-family:'HelveticaNeue',Helvetica,Arial,san-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:16.25px;">* I highly suggest you find the FULL text of the typical 'anti-black' quotes in the L-D debates, and read the WHOLE of the speech they appear in. If you are at all open-minded, you'll see that the cherry-picked quotes you've been shown very much misrepresent his viewpoint. </span>