http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000154711708973&rtmo=kNkNZe3p&atmo=KKKKKKrM&pg=/et/00/6/4/wlin04.html Abraham Lincoln 'was a racist who wanted to deport blacks' By David Wastell, in Washington ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the American president revered as "The Great Emancipator" for leading the war to abolish slavery, was really a racist who used offensive language to describe black people and wanted all Afro-Americans deported, according to newly published research which has prompted controversy in the United States. Far from being the willing forefather of today's multicultural America, President Lincoln advocated reserving the west of the country for whites, supported a law forbidding black people to settle in his home state of Illinois and was fond of racist jokes. He used two State of the Union addresses to call for the deportation of black people and shortly before his assassination in 1865 said of the thousands of slaves to be freed at the end of the Civil War: "I believe it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate which they could have to themselves." He also habitually used the word "nigger" to describe black people, something which would have shocked and dismayed the hundreds of thousands of civil rights activists in the Sixties who made the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC the focus of some of the biggest demonstrations the city has seen. The assault on President Lincoln's character and record in a book called Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, was produced over seven years by Lerone Bennett Jr, the executive editor of Ebony, a magazine aimed at black Americans. Mr Bennett regards what he calls the "Massa Lincoln myth" as a 135-year-old problem, "one of the most extraordinary efforts I know to hide a whole man and a whole history, particularly when that man is one of the most celebrated men in American history". The evidence of Lincoln's true racial beliefs is easily found, he says, in his writing and speeches. Lincoln blamed black people for the Civil War, declaring: "But for your race among us there could not be a war, although many men on either side do not care for you one way or another." Although in popular history he is given the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation - which itself did not directly call for the elimination of slavery - he only issued it under pressure from other Republicans in Congress, Mr Bennett said. However, Lincoln was seized upon by progressive Americans following his assassination, which came soon after the Confederate surrender. There was "an explosion of emotion" in the North and Lincoln was "appropriated, he was used", Mr Bennett said. By the late Sixties Lincoln's death was put in the same bracket by civil rights campaigners as the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the black Church leader. The book has prompted controversy among academics with one black professor calling it "a compelling critique" of the revered president's life. But Lincoln's defenders are infuriated by the attack. Ernest Lefever, author and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, a conservative Washington think-tank, said: "This effort to paint Lincoln as a racist is deplorable. Every man is a creature of his time, but, overwhelmingly, Lincoln was a humanitarian and decent person who thought different racial groups were equally children of God, and worthy of respect and justice. "Many people, both black and white, were for some separation. But Lincoln was never for coercion. 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