Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream is a book by the African American scholar and historian, Lerone Bennett, Jr., published in 2000. It attacks Abraham Lincoln and claims that his reputation as the "Great Emancipator" is undeserved. Historian Brian Dirck states that "Few Civil War scholars take Bennett seriously, pointing to ... [his] narrow political agenda and faulty research." Bennett's critics believe that he ignored Lincoln's political and moral growth during the Civil War and oversimplified the complexities of the times on issues of race. They disagreed with Bennett over... his failure to recognize that Lincoln was instrumental in creating the framework that brought freedom to slaves in the United States. The introduction to the book says, "[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.
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