The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Growing Our Understanding of Lincoln

Nearly eighty years ago, historian James Randall declared Lincoln to be “the most overworked [subject] in American history.” Yet there has never been a more flourishing period in Lincoln studies, thanks, in part, to the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2009 and the Civil War sesquicentennial beginning this year. Over the last decade, the number of books published on Lincoln and his family continues to thrive, between 1995-2009 approximately twenty books were written each year on Lincoln.1 Not surprisingly, nearly every aspect of his private life and public career has been the subject of major new research and revised interpretations. Which begs the question, is another book on Lincoln necessary? The answer is, yes, if the author is the distinguished historian Eric Foner, the DeWitt professor of American history at Columbia University, and the book is The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

The Fiery Trial is a fresh examination of Lincoln in the broad context of early and mid-nineteenth century and its most divisive issue: America’s “peculiar institution.” The book does not reinvent Lincoln or introduce new and original evidence, but with enviable deftness Foner documents the complicated story of Lincoln and American slavery. The result is a complex Lincoln for modern times—a contradictory blend of pragmatism and idealism, racism and open-mindedness.

The greatest strength of The Fiery Trial is putting Lincoln in his historical context, by providing a thorough account of the complicated political and social context in which Lincoln's views on slavery were formed, and the political events that ultimately brought out Lincoln’s true greatness. Historians have long puzzled over Lincoln’s apparent inconsistencies. ne the one hand, Lincoln hated slavery. There’s no reason to doubt his declaration: “I am naturally antislavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” On the other hand, he possessed a striking lack of outward sympathy for black Americans, thought that black and white Americans could not live on equal terms, and believed the solution to the “Negro problem" was colonization (sponsoring emigration to Africa, Central America or somewhere else). Foner aptly shows that these contradictions were endemic of Lincoln’s upbringing and his participation in party politics.

We come to understand, in Foner’s telling, the rather consistent course the pre-war Lincoln took in his broad outlook on slavery. Born in Kentucky and raised in Illinois, Lincoln grew up in an environment that united weak antislavery politics with strong racial prejudice. Later, when Lincoln entered political service, he joined the Whig Party, which contained a wide range of factions from fire-eating southern planters to antislavery New Englanders. He married Mary Todd, a woman from a slaveholding family. His hero was Henry Clay, a Kentucky slaveowner who was fortified by the racism that accompanied slavery, yet he looked forward to a day when slaves would be emancipated. Outside of the political system, Lincoln encountered the “anti-slavery enterprise,” as Charles Sumner called it. Men like William Lloyd Garrison who were so outraged by slavery that they called for its immediate abolition or, if that didn’t occur, the secession of the North from the South. Abolitionists often regarded men like Lincoln as unreliable and too eager for compromise.

Foner’s Lincoln enters the 1850 with “developed antislavery ideas but not a coherent antislavery ideology” (62). Lincoln, still devoted to conservative emancipation, had no plan to pursue antislavery ideas within the political system. While he believed slavery violated America’s basic principles, he remained reluctant to take action against it. When the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, Foner explains, it was Lincoln’s middle position that made him an attractive presidential candidate in 1860. Foner also credits Lincoln’s rise to his impressive rhetoric, but notes Lincoln’s great fortune in residing in the same state as Stephen Douglas, since Lincoln’s political credentials up to the presidential election of 1860 would be earned solely in challenging the Democrats presumptive presidential nominee.

Foner looks to the end of 1862 and the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation as “a crucial moment of transition” for Lincoln (238). Not only did the Proclamation establish new grounding for administration policy, its call for black military recruitment raised unsettled questions in Lincoln’s mind about African-Americans’ place in American society. More than this, Foner stresses the effect of the president’s encounters with “talented, politically active black men and women” once in the White House, which pushed him toward championing emancipation and black rights (257). This was the puzzle piece missing from Lincoln’s life prior to his presidency, and the reason his brand of anti-slavery had been moral yet strikingly abstract. Once in the White House and placed on a larger geographic and social stage, Foner argues, Lincoln’s prejudices began to soften, even if he never became a fully-fledged egalitarian. Always committed first and foremost to the military effort, by the time of his death Lincoln was engaging seriously with the question of black rights in a post-war world.

For Foner, the “hallmark of Lincoln's greatness was his capacity for growth,” a conclusion in line with the consensus view emerging from recent Lincoln studies of near constant growth for Lincoln as president (xviiii). This focus on what Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald called Lincoln’s “enormous capacity for growth,” is not new. Lincoln's oldest friend, Joshua Speed, suggested that Lincoln was a “growing man in Religion,” in an attempt to reconcile the irreligious Lincoln that Speed had known as a young man with the Bible-quoting president of the White House. Yet there is something inexact regarding Lincoln’s progressive growth. It could just as easily be argued that Lincoln hardly "grew" at all on the issue of slavery. He always detested slavery and first labeled slavery publicly as an “injustice” in 1837. Lincoln never abandoned his view that gradual emancipation rather than immediate abolition was the best solution for America’s future. Nor did he change his view that pro-slavery state laws must be respected, that is, until unforeseen forces created the opportunity that he had done everything possible to avoid. Finally, Lincoln did not grow out of his interest in colonization. Foner does show that Lincoln pursued colonization into the spring of 1863 but, in fact, Lincoln entertained colonization projects throughout that summer and beyond, dealing directly with European empires. 2 Foner rightly argues that Lincoln’s interest in colonization was not a result of his disdain for free blacks but because Lincoln believed white racism so relentless that black Americans would never achieve equality. Yet wasn’t that still a concern in 1865 when no one knew how to reconstruct the nation, and Lincoln did not know if he could or should interfere in the individual states’ social systems? Perhaps colonization was not something to “grow out of” but one of several possible policy options in a country turned upside down and inside out by civil war.

Even with some reservations about the concept of “growth,” the book should be mandatory reading for the academic and lay reader. The Fiery Trial provides a nuanced and fair account of Lincoln’s struggle with slavery. No doubt Foner will not have the last word on Lincoln. Lincoln holds a unique place in America’s collective historical imagination. As Foner noted in the preface, Lincoln has never settled quietly into the past. Lincoln is one of those rare historical figures who manages to transcend time and space and remain contemporary. Or to put it another way, Lincoln stays alive.