Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream

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Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream.

Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, commonly abbreviated to the title Forced into Glory is a controversial work by the African American scholar and historian, Lerone Bennett, Jr.. It attacks Abraham Lincoln and claims that his reputation as the "Great Emancipator" is undeserved. The book has been a target of criticism, and has been banned from more conservative literary circles. ^{[citation needed]}

The introduction to the book states that "[Lerone Bennett]'s basic idea of the book is simple: Everything you think you know about Lincoln and race is wrong. Every schoolchild, for example, knows the story of "the great emancipator" who freed Negroes with a stroke of the pen out of the goodness of his heart. The real Lincoln...was a conservative politician who said repeatedly that he believed in white supremacy. Not only that: He opposed the basic principle of the Emancipation Proclamation until his death and was literally forced--Count Adam Gurowski said he was literally whipped--"into the glory of having issued the Emancipation Proclamation," which Lincoln drafted in such a way that it did not in and of itself free a single slave."

The book is dedicated to a plethora of individuals whom Bennett calls "the real abolitionists", including Frederick Douglass, Thadeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips. In the dedication, he praises them for "forc[ing] Lincoln into glory".

Several opponents of Bennett state that he is forcing his modern opinions on the past. As an example, they claim that the widespread use of the word "nigger" in the Civil War era means that a person from that period who used it is not necessarily a racist.