In summary, no. Lincoln would probably rank as one of the best friends American blacks have had. Racist? Yes. More racist than the average Northerner? No. He was quite radical anti-slavery in Illinois for his time.

To put things into context, Lincoln was running for Senate against Stephen Douglas who was the leading advocate of “States Rights” and the Kansas Nebraska Act which specifically sought to spread slavery into free territories like Kansas. Ultimately, Lincoln lost to Douglas mostly because he was not racist enough.

The quote you provided was from the Lincoln Douglas Debates and is repeated often by Confederate apologists who point to that statement and say “Lincoln was no better than the plantation owners.” If you read the full debates, you will see two radical opposing arguments. Lincoln is clearly anti-slavery and Douglas argues the opposite.

From Douglas, he supposedly “didn’t care” whether any state had slavery or not and argued let each decide. This was a political ploy to expand slavery into territories that were always going to be free. Illinois voters were highly interested in this conversation about the negros down south but they were more concerned how things would affect them in Illinois. They did not want hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves moving north, taking their jobs, defiling their women, voting and taking power, etc... So, Lincoln had to argue that just because he is anti slavery doesn’t mean he supports black men sleeping with your daughters.

By today’s standards that quote you provided was extremely racist. But don’t always judge Lincoln by what he says. Lincoln was an extremely talented lawyer and politician and always knew what to say to win. He needed to convince very racist Illinois voters that he was on their side.

What you can do is read what Douglas said in the same debate series. He basically was a white supremacist. The KKK only started after the Civil War so he lived before the term existed but he was aligned with Southern pro-slavery radicals such as Atchison and Calhoun. The voters ultimately sided with Douglas on a campaign defined by racial issues.

The Lincoln Douglas Debates are a key reference.

A fantastic biography on Lincoln was written by the two men who worked for him, John Jay and John Nicolay, “Lincoln: A History”

Not that its that surprising that someone from back then would hold these views, but this is you know Abraham Lincoln, and it seems to me that there are some serious consequences if he really did think this way. Wouldn't saying for instance that the Confederacy's entire reason for fighting was for slavery and white supremacy be shown as being bunk, and that the actual reasons for fighting the war were a lot more nuanced, since everyone even President Lincoln was pro white superiority? Or am I extrapolating too much from this one quote?

I'm no expert on Lincoln, so I can't say much on how this quote fits in with other things he has said. However, on your take about the civil war, it's a slight misunderstanding to think the phrase "the civil war was fought over slavery" to mean "the civil war was fought over the morality of slavery".

It's also misleading to say "it was fought for state's rights" - more misleading than claiming it was fought over the morality of slavery, in my view.

It honestly had much more to do with base economics and politics, in a much more banal way than many would want to admit. Wealthy slave owners were often some of the most wealthy people in America, and had strong influence on politics. Many debates were held about whether new states were to be slave states or free states. Naturally, slave owners would prefer them to be slave states, as it expands the areas for them to do commerce in. Free states wanted to curb the influence of these wealthy men on politics. Cue a bunch of debates, squabbles and outright fighting, and eventually you had the wealthy men seceding in order to create a new state with even more power and privilege given to slave owners than before.

So it was about slavery. Not the morality, but about the insitutions and politics created by slavery, the money and wealth and economics of slavery.

If you're asking if Lincoln believed that black Americans were equals to white Americans then he probably did not and if he did, he worked hard to argue the other way for political purposes. At that point, the content of his heart is not of primary significance.

I must say probably because it's obvious that Lincoln thinks black people and white people are different -he even refers to physical differences- and that they can and should live separately for both parties' own good, but the issue of racial characteristics itself doesn't seem to have drawn much of Lincoln's attention. He wasn't the type to go around theorizing about brain sizes or otherwise engage with the period race theory as to how and why black people just weren't as good as white people. He engaged with proslavery theory, which is closely allied, but only to pick it apart and oppose it.

The best we have are his political statements, where he is consistently antislavery but has few qualms about appealing to base bigotry in exchange for votes. This makes him pretty normal for his era and occasionally he will go way out ahead of the times, but only for rhetorical effect and then to pull back. It's possible that his lack of engagement with race theory and instrumental attitude toward prejudice enabled him to evolve in the way he's famous for as the war went on. By the end, he's crossed Rubicons unimaginable to most white Americans in the summer of 1860: black men fighting as American soldiers, a durable place for black Americans in a nation that no longer enslaves most of them, a swift and uncompensated end to slavery enacted largely by force, and even the vote for at least those black men who fought for their country or otherwise demonstrated the virtues he wanted in a citizen.

But Lincoln distinguishes between rights he considers natural (we might say human rights) like the right to not be enslaved, political rights (the vote, holding office) and social rights (integration, intermarriage, etc.) From the start Lincoln is convinced of some kind of equality on the first front; he's always antislavery, though his focus is mainly on the threat slavery poses to white republicanism (small-r there), white freedom, and white labor. Moving through toward political rights is where he famously evolves. Neither Lincoln nor many other white Americans, and certainly few to none holding high office during his lifetime, is prepared to endorse social equality.

So is he a white supremacist? Yes. When push comes to shove, Lincoln both tells us and acts as a man committed to ensuring that black Americans are at least informally segregated out of parts of American life. He habitually refers to some black people he employs for years in demeaning ways that he would not use with white inferiors. He believes slavery has damaged the freedpeople and they need whites to take them in hand and teach them how to live independently. He clearly believes that black people are just not quite as good as whites, or behaves indistinguishably from someone who does. In all of these he differs not at all from most white men of his era. Even far more radical antislavery men and abolitionists than Lincoln harbor many of the same prejudices.

It's natural to read that and thing it doesn't matter. Lincoln was a person of his age and if they were all like that, it's much the same as none of them being that way. It can feel unfair to call him out, like grinding modern day axes with as much justice as expecting him to have an opinion on the space program. This misses at least two vital points that cannot be neglected if we want to understand the history thoroughly. The lesser of the two is that Lincoln was a white supremacist who was much less white supremacist than many of his peers. Excusing him is going too far, but so is imagining him as another Calhoun. There's a complicated range of opinions and modalities for white supremacy and by focusing strictly on the is/is not binary we can tell a simpler story that might be more comfortable to us but ignores historical realities.

The much more important point lost is that there are millions of Americans of Lincoln's era who do believe themselves just as worthy, capable, and talented as any white and deserving of full equality in every form of rights. I refer specifically to black Americans, who fought the struggle against slavery long before any homely guy from Illinois involved himself despite an almost absolute exclusion from political life and most of them being actually enslaved. If we say "everyone" was a white supremacist, we write them and the rest of white America's long list of victims out of the national story. We would, whether we mean to or not, carry on our part in the project that white Americans began long ago of insisting that only they and their interests matter. We would, to use the word, hold white superior to non-whites ourselves.