A constant current means, for an ideal motor, a constant torque. This is approximately true for real motors. It doesn't matter what you attach to the motor, or how fast it's turning.
What you seem to be missing is Newton's second law of motion. It states that force is the product of mass and acceleration:
$$ F = ma $$
The constant current you supply to the motor is one force. The weight opposes that force. The difference is the net force, \$F\$ in this equation, and \$m\$ is the mass of the weight, plus the mass of the rotor and the string and everything else the motor must move.
You set current to be sent to the motor so that the torque applied is 10 in-lbs without any load.
Not possible. There is nothing for the motor to "torque against". This is the mechanical equivalent of trying to develop 10 volts across a dead short. The motor will rapidly spin at its maximum speed, and the back-EMF will rise to the driving voltage such that your driving electronics are unable to supply enough voltage above the back-EMF to make enough current to have that much torque.
Let's just say you determine how much current is required for 10 in-lbs of torque, and you drive your motor with a constant-current supply set to that.
What happens when the torque from the weight/load is 5 in-lbs?
Assuming that the rotor and the string are massless and frictionless, the weight will be accelerated upwards by the net 5 in-lbs of torque (motor's 10 in-lbs, less 5 in-lbs from the weight). The rate of the acceleration is determined by the mass of the weight and Newton's law above.
As the speed of the motor changes (the weight is accelerating), the back-EMF also changes. Your constant-current supply to the motor will have to apply an increasing voltage to maintain the same current. Electrical power thus goes up, as does mechanical power.
What happens when the torque from the weight/load is 10 in-lbs?
Motor torque balances weight torque. However fast the weight is moving (if at all), it keeps doing that. Newton's first law applies.
What happens when the torque from the weight/load is 15 in-lbs?
The weight will accelerate downward, overpowering the motor. However, it won't be a free-fall. The motor cancels some of the force of the weight, resulting in a slower acceleration downwards.
If the weight overpowers the motor, then eventually it can get the motor to run backwards, relative to the way it would run if there were no load. When this happens, the back-EMF now adds (instead of subtracts) from the voltage you apply to the motor. At some point, your controller, which is attempting to maintain a constant current, must apply a negative voltage to maintain that current. In other words, the back-EMF is sufficient to create the necessary torque on its own: your controller must oppose it.
This is perfectly symmetrical with the first case, where the motor was overpowering the weight. In that case, electrical and mechanical power went up (without bound, if you let them). In this case, electrical and mechanical power go down (negative, if you let them). Energy is conserved because you are changing the gravitational potential of the weight.
The need to resist the back-EMF usually means storing electrical energy in a capacitor or battery, or using it to heat a resistor. If you can't do this fast enough, then the motor will create more torque than your desired 10 in-lbs, and you have hit the limits of your "constant current" driver.
Further reading:
I think your basic idea is OK, but the pot idea is not very good. The problem is that you have to take the position signal and differentiate it to get speed, and noise will be a big problem.
What you need is a rotary rate sensor, and there are a variety of these. An obvious choice would be a tachometer. DC motors can be found with built-in tachometers specifically to make regulating rotation rate simple. Encoders, particularly optical encoders, are cheap these days, and your job is made easier by the fact that you don't need an absolute encoder - incremental will work just fine for this application. There are other, more exotic sensors such as synchros and resolvers, as well.
What you do is to make a feedback loop that compares the rotational velocity to a desired value and adjusts the motor voltage accordingly. Depending on how ambitious you are for your loop design, you can adjust for a wide range of speeds and loads with a single circuit. And since you're interested in controlling speed rather than position, the feedback loop can be quite simple and still give good performance.
Best Answer
Any DC motor with permanent magnets can easily be a generator. It doesn't matter whether it is brushed or not; brushless motors make great generators but you will need to add a rectifier to get a DC output.
If the motor has a separate field winding instead of a permanent magnet, you will need to energise that winding from an external DC source, e.g. a battery.
For example, a car alternator has DC slip-rings (not a commutator!) to supply a small field current to the rotor, and a three phase (usually) stator winding. To get anything out, you must energise the field winding, and then you get 3-phase AC from the stator, which must be rectified in order to obtain DC. You can control the output power (and therefore the load the alternator places on the shaft) by modulating the field current.
You can google up plenty of howtos that tell you how to make a wind generator from recycled or homemade brushless permanent-magnet motors. They're a good design specifically because of the lack of brushes, because brushes wear out, are expensive and inefficient compared to a silicon rectifier.
If it's a "series wound" DC motor, I don't think it will generate unless part of the motor chassis is residually magnetised. That style of motor (only two terminals connecting to two windings and no permanent magnets) is generally not appropriate for generation because you have no guarantee it will do anything, and no good way to control the generated power/load.