He also advocated sending blacks back to Africa and places like Haiti as he didn't think they could ever live in harmony with whites.
Lincoln wanted to end slavery—but wasn’t keen on integrating African Americans into US society. His first attempt to send them offshore proved disastrous.
On the night of December 31, 1862, a day before he issued the final
Emancipation Proclamation to effectively end slavery in America, President
Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock, an entrepreneur and Florida cotton planter. Their agreement: to use federal funds to relocate 5,000 formerly enslaved people from the United States to Île à Vache (“Cow Island”), a small, 20-square-mile island off the southwestern coast of Haiti.
Since the early 1850s, Lincoln had been advancing
colonization as a remedy for the gradual emancipation of the nation’s enslaved. While he strongly opposed the institution of
slavery, he didn’t believe in racial equality, or that people of different races could successfully integrate. And unleashing nearly 4 million Black people into white American society—North or South—was a political nonstarter. So despite the fact that most Black Americans in the 1850s had been born on U.S. soil, Lincoln advocated shipping them to Central America, the Caribbean or “back” to Africa. “If as the friends of colonization hope…[we] succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land,” Lincoln said during his eulogy for statesman
Henry Clay in 1852, “it will indeed be a glorious consummation.”
“Lincoln saw colonization as a practical solution to the millions freed by the Emancipation Proclamation,” wrote Jayme Ruth Spencer, a scholar of the Île à Vache effort. “Thus the proclamation would satisfy those who wished for emancipation of the Negro as well as those who feared that the freed slave would overrun the North.”
https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-black-resettlement-haiti
