The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln And American Slavery, by Eric Foner

There are a lot of books that have been written about Abraham Lincoln, including a great many I have read (which is only a small percentage of the total), and though this particular author has written about Abraham Lincoln indirectly, this book is the first time that he has written about Lincoln as a subject, and it is definitely a worthwhile book from an accomplished historian with a very particular interest when it comes to Lincoln. The author’s aim in this book is to examine Lincoln’s growth with regards to how he tackled the issue of slavery. Everything in this book about Lincoln is filtered through Lincoln’s involvement with slavery, which for the most part was indirect and theoretical. It was not until after Lincoln was a president that he came face-to-face with a large number of people who had been in slavery, and his actions in the Civil War, especially as the Civil War went on, demonstrate real personal growth on his part when dealing with the issue of slavery and the larger issue of race in which it was entangled, a struggle that we still deal with today.

This book is about 350 pages long and it is divided into 9 chapters along with other material. The book begins with a list of maps and illustrations and then contains a preface where the author talks about the book and its approach. The rest of the book then generally proceeds in a chronological order through Lincoln and his involvement with slavery. It begins with a discussion of Lincoln’s experience of slavery in his youth as an observer of it (1). The author then looks at Lincoln’s perspective as a loyal Whig with a particular view of the law and its obligations relating to slaveowners (2) during the period of the Second Party System, which sought to minimize discussion of slavery. The author then discusses Lincoln becoming a Republican and how this shaped his antislavery mindset (3). A chapter is devoted to Lincoln’s speeches in the late 1850s about issues of slavery and race (4). This is followed by a discussion of Lincoln’s view of how he disagreed from Unionist Southerners about slavery in the secession crisis (5). The author explores Lincoln’s caution in dealing with the issue of slavery during the early part of the war as he sought to maintain the commitment of border states like Kentucky to the Union effort (6). After this the author writes about the coming of emancipation and what it meant as far as Lincoln’s speaking and behavior relating to the peculiar institution (7). This is followed by Lincoln’s efforts to secure emancipation by urging the passage of an antislavery constitutional Amendment, which ended up being the 13th Amendment we know today (8). The author then discusses the challenge of Lincoln in facing re-election as well as dealing with abolition and reconstruction (9), after which the author closes the book with a discussion of the meaning of the war in the Second Inaugural in a short epilogue as well as acknowledgements, a chronology of Lincoln, slavery, and emancipation, list of abbreviations used in the notes, and the endnotes and index.

Foner’s excellence is not only based on his encyclopedic knowledge of the issue of slavery and the problem of Reconstruction, which is where he made his reputation as a historian, but also his ability to place Lincoln as a man within his own time dealing with external realities but also seeking, in some small way, to shake them. Among Lincoln’s greatest strengths as a president was saying things that managed to satisfy both more conservative and more radical wings of the Republican Party. Conservatives figured Lincoln to be like them and appreciated his caution and his slow pace, while Radicals recognized that his actions were increasingly hostile to slavery and also demonstrative of a high degree of seriousness in wrestling with the attitudes that had led to slavery and inequality being so pervasive within American society by the time of the Civil War. Foner’s sophisticated analysis of Lincoln’s writings and his conversations, and the way in which he sought to, however belatedly, address the problem of what place that rebellious southern whites and loyal but ambitious blacks had within postwar American society, places him in a very high class of historians. If you have an interest in Abraham Lincoln and the issue of race and slavery, this book is a good one to read, as it points out some of the ways in which the Civil War and its legacy continues to affect us today.