The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery Catherine Clinton The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Pp. 448. Cloth $29.95.) Certainly with the gusher of new scholarly literature that appeared in the wake of Abraham Lincoln's 2009 bicentennial year, it is hard to imagine welcoming yet another study of our sixteenth president. However, Eric Foner has managed to defy the odds. His new study of Lincoln and slavery is essential reading for anyone interested in Civil War history. This work is neither a full biography of Lincoln nor mere intellectual archeology. Rather, The Fiery Trial is a brilliant extended brief, a judicious summation of the case for taking seriously superlatives showered upon Lincoln over the years. (Only in Lincoln studies can a 336-page book, with over 50 pages of notes, be labeled a "brief.") Foner's elegant analysis frames Lincoln within the context of the past half-century of scholarly revisionism. It also is my opinion that The Fiery Trial represents Foner's magnum opus. His many outstanding historical contributions (including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution) are not merely prelude, but they laid the foundation for this tour de force analysis of Lincoln's role in slavery's end and emancipation's beginnings. Foner has a well-established reputation as an intellectual who speaks to the future through his energetic engagement with the past. His new study of Lincoln will reverberate beyond the moat to which too many academics confine themselves—as he pushes beyond the castle walls, to reveal a perspective on the past that captures contemporary imaginations. [End Page 71] Lincoln studies is an imperial enterprise, where people like to proclaim themselves sovereign and quibble over minutiae. Foner's approach rises above the fray. He dispassionately outlines the remarkable challenges Lincoln confronted: how to transform a divided people into a nation fulfilling the promise of its revolutionary origins. The quality of Foner's research is reflected not just in his footnotes, which are awe inspiring, don't get me wrong. But more impressive, Fiery Trial dances along the castle wall—as if balletically swashbuckling up the parapets, taking readers to dizzying heights. Foner's dexterity and authority is clearly visible to those within as well as those outside the legendary fortress supplied and defended by the Lincoln industrial complex. Admittedly, this volume can be intense for those unfamiliar with nineteenth-century political thought. Yet heavy lifting pays off as Lincoln's motives and intent during the war years provide powerful insight into unfolding events—as if we are seeing the war through Lincoln's eyes in "real time," a provocative perspective. Foner's decades of deep and wide reading in African American history enrich his work immeasurably—as he brings to life many regularly marginalized. The Fiery Trial's inclusion in the gallery of images of a photograph of William Johnson's grave—the young black man who accompanied the Lincolns to Washington from Springfield—typifies Foner's achievement in this regard. He suggests the word "Citizen" carved on the tombstone in 1864 was both a rebuke and a signal from Lincoln. Foner critiques as he interprets: "Lincoln and other Republicans' account of the attitudes of the revolutionary generation toward slavery was highly selective" (71). We learn how the push and pull of abolitionism affected party politics and sectional divides in antebellum America. Particularly within his fourth chapter ("'A House Divided': Slavery and Race in the Late 1850s") Foner's skilful blend of sources, ideas, and arguments offers a vivid appreciation of America's zigzag toward secession and war. Foner warns us that "race is our obsession, not Lincoln's" (120). He engages again, in a kind of dance, balancing on the knife-edge to show a twenty-first-century reader the complexities of race during the nineteenth century. He places Lincoln's dilemmas within the context of his own times, not ours. Foner concedes that many conundrums may never be fully understood. I particularly appreciated his inclusion of Lincoln's marginalia from 1858: "Negro equality! Fudge!" without comment (122). More comment on Lincoln's...