Where would you find this opinion?

[David Lockmiller]

(03-26-2022 10:53 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  Diplomatic recognition of Haiti and Liberia had long been resisted on the grounds that those nations might send blacks to represent them at Washington. Lincoln, however, did not object to that possibility. When James Redpath told him that President Fabre Nicolas Geffrard of Haiti was willing to appoint a white representative rather than a black one to Washington, Lincoln replied: "Well -- you can tell Mr. Geffrard that I shan't tear my shirt if he does send a negro here!"

The Haitian government appointed a black army colonel, Ernest Roumain, as its first minister to the United States.

Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. Two, p. 351, by Professor Michael Burlingame.

I presume that "I shan't tear my shirt" may be a reference to Robert Burns' poem, but I do not know.

I now believe that this may be a reference made by President Lincoln to Hamlet - Act 3, Scene 2.

I Googled various terms and eventually found the following:

No Fear
Hamlet
Act 3 Scene 2


ORIGINAL TEXT
Enter Hamlet and Players
HAMLET

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.


Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others.