The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Abstract

During the last few years a combination of factors, including the national celebration of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, has triggered an avalanche of books about the country's sixteenth president. Eric Foner has now written the best one yet published on the critically important subject identified in its subtitle: Lincoln's views about and actions regarding chattel slavery in the United States. Aimed at a general audience, the book is clearly and accessibly written, shrewd and nuanced in argumentation, and filled with invaluable detail about its subject. Foner mostly abjures explicit contestation with other authors, even in his notes. Even so, he counterposes his emphasis on Lincoln's transformation over time with unnamed writers who treat Lincoln as a fixed quantity, someone whose words and deeds can be explained “primarily in terms of his own character, psychology, legal training, or political philosophy that remained constant throughout his life” (p. xvii). Foner's Lincoln is very much the product of his specific time and place. The book's first chapter, which depicts the political atmosphere of the upper South and lower North where Lincoln grew to adulthood, is an especially rich and valuable contribution. But that region and the country as a whole were extremely dynamic socially and politically, and that dynamism also left its mark on Lincoln's views, which changed significantly over the course of his life.

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