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I had cause to be up in Missouri this past week, and stopped in at the Wilson's Creek Battlefield Park.

I found this quote of Lincoln's from 1855 to be interesting...



Actually I dunno that anyone has documented purposeful slave breeding per se, tho several have looked. Might be a woman, able to bear but one child a year but fertile all year round, had enough chances of conceiving already without needing to bring guys in to make it so.

Sorta related, noted Southern diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut on the topic, a highly intelligent woman who moved in the highest Confederate circles....

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mary_Boykin_Chesnut

Like the patriarchs of our old men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.

...and entirely unrelated, but a quote of Mrs. Chestnut's worthy of a sig line....

...it is the habit of all men to fancy that in some inscrutable way their wives are the cause of all evil in their lives."

Back to Lincoln, here he is explaining himself in 1855, the letter from which the above quote was drawn....

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm

You inquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point -- I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.

When I was in Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of any one attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics."

When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

FYI the Whigs were a major political party in the 1830's to 1850's favoring a US bank, tariffs and protectionism, formed in opposition to that OTHER staunch Unionist, the otherwise States-rights guy Andrew Jackson. The party ended over the question of allowing slavery into the territories.

Birdwatcher