Deflating Lincoln to a flawed, human scale.

Abraham Lincoln was the humbly born "Honest Abe," the Great Emancipator who freed the slaves in America. Lincoln was a white supremacist who said whatever the crowd wanted to hear, freed hardly any slaves, used the N-word frequently and, if he had had his druthers, would have sent all blacks back to Africa.

Pick the history you prefer. Lerone Bennett Jr. prefers the second interpretation of Lincoln and elaborates on it in a 652-page assault, "Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream," (Johnson Publishing, $35).

Bennett, author, editor and acclaimed historian a Ebony magazine, is not quite successful in his effort to convince us that Lincoln was an …