If president lincoln was not a racist what did he mean in this quote exactly?

[Me]

"I am not now, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social or political equality of the white and black races. I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarriages with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality. There must be a position of superior and inferior, and I am in favor of assigning the superior position to the white man."

I am just curious as to why i was being treated like an idiot for suggesting that he was racist.
I think that this quote is pretty cut and dry...
I think that people other than myself need to grow up and realize that being closed minded and only trusting in what we were taught as children isn't the safest method for gaining any real knowledge.
The majority of what i have said iw not opinion. The bulk of my text was the actual quote which still has yet to even be acknowledged or explained.

 

[andykarley]

Your not an idiot. We reaserched this in AP history a month back and came to the assumption he favored whites over blacks which he did but did so because of his upbringing and the political and social estate at the time. You know he wanted to send them back to Africa because he believed they would never face true equality and treated fairly.

 

[ArdiPithecus©]

"...trusting in what we were taught as children isn't the safest method for gaining any real knowledge."????????

And what was that that you were taught--that Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, that Washington chopped down the cherry tree, and that the political campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was NOT the ugliest, meanest campaign in US history? I ask, because I don't understand your point.

If you were taught that Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, someone taught you wrong. But other answers are right: you must put his bigotry into perspective. He thought that blacks could never be treated equally, and would never gain what they deserved politically if they stayed here. It's true he didn't think they were worth as much as whites, but he might have bought into the idea that they were mentally inferior, which could have been easily believed if you were subjected to the English they spoke, which was uneducated--but uneducated because the slave owners didn't want to hear educated nig*ers. He probably thought the few educated blacks he met were an anomaly, and if that is what he thought, perhaps he wasn't so racist after all--but instead wanted those educated blacks to have all they deserved and he knew (or believed) they wouldn't get it in the US.

 

[mThinkistm]

Little known fact, the reason for the Civil War was not to end slavery, but at the time Lincoln was losing supporters and the war changed that.