Azure, it's important not to confuse "the political equality of white and black races" with abolition. Lincoln was an abolitionist--by his own, repeated admission, and from the earliest times of his career.
In all seriousness, this is not a matter that we need spend a great deal trading links on. Instead, look for the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and for his "house divided" speech, which he gave when accepting the nomination for Senator for the Republican party. Lincoln did not believe in racial equality (in fact, to do so would have been to be far more radical than 90% of abolitionists) but he clearly believed a) in the abolition of slavery and b) that this issue was eventually going to cause armed conflict in the U.S.
Like I said, all you need to do is to look at what prompted him to enter politics. It was the expansion of slavery under the Kansas-Nebraska act, which was merely the most recent of a number of provocations that slaveholding states had given the free states since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law--which you'll recall was the impetus for Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience."
Lincoln was not perfect--and you're right about one thing, which is that he oversaw a massive and radical acquisition of power by the federal government, in part as a necessary effect of waging civil war with the south--but many of those powers remain in place to-day.
But it's possible to make too much of incidental connections with slaveholding families. Keep in mind that slaveholding Americans and abolitionists more or less rubbed elbows, being separated by the Ohio river in much of the northeast, and of course being separated by nothing at all in the case of Washington D.C., which was effectively located near the heart of the pro-slavery movement.
So Lincoln married the daughter of a slaveholder. So what? I married the daughter of an Anglican. Does that mean I sympathize with Anglicans?
In the end, we need only look to what Lincoln said about the issue of slavery, and more importantly what he did about it. At the end of the day, you'll find many more vocal abolitionists, but you won't find any who were as effective.
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