If you haven't already, please read the transcript from the Lincoln/Douglas debates. There can be no other understanding than how little Lincoln thought of Black people. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't about freeing the enslaved but winning a war; keeping France and Britain from partnering with the South and disrupting the Southern economy by encouraging the enslaved to escape to the North. Combine that with his desire to ship freedmen off to Liberia and Central America, that pretty much says it all.