No, the Republicans in the South now are forced to embrace Lincoln because he was a Republican, a party started explicitly as the anti-slavery party. It is a way for the Southern wing of the GOP, who were Democrats and hated Lincoln until 1960, and now hate him as Southern Republicans, to pretend to wear the mantle of Civil Rights and ending slavery, when in fact they fought totally against it. They are just taunting ‘diverse’ people.

After the Civil War ended, most confederates went back to vote for Democrats and took up arms, killing white Republicans “carpetbaggers” and their black allies in insurrectionist massacres like the Colfax massacre or the Hamburg massacre. These were politically motivated murders of black federal troops, not just occurring for no reason. Three white Republicans were shot with a “single bullet” at the Coushatta massacre in 1874, for example, by the White League, a Democrat militia of supremacists, but their black Republican allies were not just killed but brutally mutilated. The Meridian massacre, the Meridian massacre, the Eutaw massacre, the Elton massacre, etc—all before the 1876 election in an effort to drive the Union “Republican” army out of the South. It worked. They won. The Union withdrew their troops, returning the South and a couple other border states to one party run white supremacist kingdoms of white rule until 1964.