Agreed, not necessarily true, yet true more often than not.

Racism in my own state of Alabama has always seemed strongest in areas where few or no blacks may be found. These areas conform neatly to counties that traditionally voted Republican (pre-FDR) and were Unionist strongholds in the 1860s. The same is almost certainly true in other states.

Up until recently I thought Free Soil advocates in the North opposed the extension of slavery in the territories simply because they opposed slavery. Guess I was wrong. They opposed the extension of slavery because blacks and other minorities were unwelcome in places they wanted to live. Apparently they didn't care much for Southerners of any color; black, red or white.

Anyone interested in the meaning of the Civil War and how Northern conquest of the Southern states has shaped our world today, let me suggest Michael Lind's book, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President, Doubleday, May 2005.

The following passages come from a review of Lind's book --

As Lincoln said in the 1850s, "Is it not rather our duty to make labor more respectable by preventing all black competition, especially in the territories?" He went on to warn that if slavery were allowed to spread, "Negro equality will be abundant, as every white laborer will have occasion to regret when he is elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave [N-word]s."

As Lind notes, the Free Soil movement so crucial to Lincoln's achieving the presidency was closely related to the colonization movement that preceded it. Both were concerned with sparing white workers from having to compete with black ones, initially in the newer states of the Midwest and then as far as California.

Lincoln described himself as a "Henry Clay Whig." Lind explains: "Henry Clay's plan for the American nation-state combined an industrial economy created by Hamiltonian methods" -- that is, using protectionist tariffs and government spending to promote manufacturing and shrink the economic role of raw-material producers, mainly farmers -- "with a white-only society created by Jeffersonian racial policies. His disciple Abraham Lincoln adopted Clay's entire nation-building program as his own."

"But for the difference in habit of observation," Lincoln once wondered aloud, "why did Yankees, almost instantly, discover gold in California, which had been trodden upon, and overlooked, by Indians and Mexican greasers, for centuries?" As his language suggests, Lincoln saw American destiny as white.

These are small samples from this very careful study of Lincoln's beliefs and goals for his America.

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/books/what_lincoln_believed