Review by Choice Review
As a historical subject, Abraham Lincoln has attracted thousands of books and articles; just the books on his Emancipation Proclamation alone would fill many a library shelf, yet more books on Lincoln appear every year. Foner (Columbia) adds his own interpretation of Lincoln's political career, with an especially careful look at the process of abolishing slavery. Instead of a modern interpretation of Lincoln's actions, Foner places the emancipation discussion in the context of contemporary politics, with Lincoln as only one of a number of players in the debate. Foner describes the various implications and nuances of freeing the slaves, including the contentious issues of colonization, African American military service, and the future rights of former slaves in the war's aftermath. The pace of the adeptly written book does not exceed the vast amount of information presented, leaving readers with a complete yet understandable narrative of momentous historical events. The result is a highly readable and comprehensive view with some information that advanced readers might already know, but that is presented in a different viewpoint. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. J. Ramold Eastern Michigan University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
DO we need yet another book on Lincoln, especially in the wake of all the Lincoln volumes that appeared last year in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of his birth? Well, yes, we do - if the book is by so richly informed a commentator as Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia. Foner tackles what would seem to be an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and manages to cast new light on it. Foner has long been deliberating about Lincoln. He is, most recently, the editor of a collection of essays, "Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World," and among his previous books are a seminal one on the rise of the Republican Party, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men," and another, "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877," in which Lincoln's fledgling policies toward the defeated South were revised in the decade just after the Civil War. Having probed the politics of the Civil War era, Foner is in a strong position to offer what amounts to a political biography of Lincoln. His approach in "The Fiery Trial" underscores the usefulness of contextual study. Many of history's leading figures, from Shakespeare and Beethoven through American presidents to popular entertainers, have been written about endlessly by traditional biographers. But barring the discovery of new letters, long-hidden diaries or the like, fresh information is hard to find about eminent people whose every small motion has been put under the biographical microscope. Recent years have witnessed books on Lincoln's marriage, his supposed homosexuality, and his melancholia and occasional temper tantrums. Such books are often fascinating and provocative, but their originality and reliability can vary greatly, since no new cache of private Lincolniana has recently come to light. Fortunately, there's a way of re-envisioning even the most famous people: by freshly examining their relationship to their historical contexts. The great figures of history, as Melville wrote, "are parts of the times; they themselves are the times, and possess a correspondent coloring." Lincoln was no exception. By venturing into Lincoln's contexts, Foner doesn't choose the direction of, say, military history or popular culture or sexual mores. Instead, he keeps sharply focused on Lincoln's political background. This is a wise move since Lincoln was a politician to the core. Because of his broad-ranging knowledge of the 19 th century, Foner is able to provide the most thorough and judicious account of Lincoln's attitudes toward slavery that we have to date. Historians have long been puzzled by apparent inconsistencies. One the one hand, Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. 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 had a racist streak. He used the words "nigger" and "darky" in conversation, and he thought that blacks, whom he regarded as physically different from whites, should be deported to Liberia, Central America or somewhere else, since they couldn't live on equal terms with whites in America. No one was more eloquent than Lincoln in describing the injustice of the institution of slavery; yet rarely did he dwell on the actual sufferings of America's four million enslaved blacks. FONER reveals that these contradictions were part and parcel of Lincoln's upbringing and his participation in party politics. Born in 1809 in the slave state of Kentucky, Lincoln was taken at 7 to live in southwestern Indiana, a region, Foner informs us, that was moderate in its views of slavery but pervaded by racism. Lincoln's later move to Illinois immersed him in a milieu that coupled tepid antislavery politics with, again, fierce racial prejudice. Then came Lincoln's political service in the Whig Party, which contained a range of factions, from fire-eating Southern planters to antislavery New Englanders. Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, belonged to a family of slaveholders. His political idol, Henry Clay, was himself a man of contradiction: he was a Kentucky slave owner who accepted the hidebound racial views of the time, yet looked forward to a day when the nation's enslaved blacks would be emancipated. Outside the party system were abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who were so outraged by slavery that they called for its immediate abolition or, if that didn't occur, the separation of the North from the South. Faced with this welter of attitudes, Foner shows, Lincoln steered a middle course. He believed slavery violated America's basic principles - a view he expressed forcefully and frequently. Still, he was reluctant to take dramatic action against it, unlike some of the radicals within the Whig Party. He remained so devoted to the American Constitution, with its protections of slavery, that he supported (albeit with reluctance) the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed stiff penalties on Northerners who assisted runaway slaves. At the same time, he never faltered in his effort to prevent slavery's western expansion, and he refused to follow party conservatives who were overly conciliatory to the South. When the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, Foner explains, it was Lincoln's middling position that made him the North's most attractive presidential candidate in 1860 and helped him keep his wits about him during the tumultuous war years. So dexterously did he navigate the political waters that he could rightly claim credit for bringing about slavery's abolition. While appreciatively discussing Lincoln's moderation, Foner takes an unblinking look at the blots on his record: a court case during his lawyer years when he defended a Southerner trying to repossess a slave family that had claimed its freedom in Illinois; his early opposition to political rights for blacks; his stubborn belief in the need to deport American blacks, even after the scheme had become untenable; his statement that he conducted the war to preserve the Union, regardless of whether slavery survived; and an astonishing remark he once made that held blacks responsible for bringing on the Civil War because of their presence in America. Foner adeptly contextualizes these unsavory aspects of Lincoln's history. He points out that only a handful of whites in that era espoused racial attitudes that today would be considered consistently progressive. Racism was rampant, and Lincoln reflected it. Above all he treasured the American Union. And though he venerated the law, he was willing to use his powers as a wartime president to supersede the law, as when he suspended habeas corpus as part of his effort to crush the Southern rebellion. Lincoln also exhibited a remarkable ability to alter his attitudes according to circumstance. At first dismissive of the abilities of black people, he came to sincerely admire them during the Civil War and eventually made strides toward endorsing political rights for them. Once staunchly opposed to the immediate abolition of slavery, he was the first president who took action in the cause of emancipation and in time, of course, he dedicated the war effort to the goal of freedom. Lincoln once declared that he couldn't control events; they controlled him. More cogently than any previous historian, Foner examines the political events that shaped Lincoln and ultimately brought out his true greatness. With Sojourner Truth in an 1862 print celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation. The young Lincoln was immersed in a milieu that coupled antislavery politics with fierce racial prejudice. David S. Reynolds, a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of "Walt Whitman's America," "John Brown, Abolitionist" and "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 6, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A mixture of visionary progressivism and repugnant racism, Abraham Lincoln's attitude toward slavery is the most troubling aspect of his public life, one that gets a probing assessment in this study. Columbia historian and Bancroft Prize winner Foner (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men) traces the complexities of Lincoln's evolving ideas about slavery and African-Americans: while he detested slavery, he also publicly rejected political and social equality for blacks, dragged his feet (critics charged) on emancipating slaves and accepting black recruits into the Union army, and floated schemes for "colonizing" freedmen overseas almost to war's end. Foner situates this record within a lucid, nuanced discussion of the era's turbulent racial politics; in his account Lincoln is a canny operator, cautiously navigating the racist attitudes of Northern whites, prodded-and sometimes willing to be prodded-by abolitionists and racial egalitarians pressing faster reforms. But as Foner tells it, Lincoln also embodies a society-wide transformation in consciousness, as the war's upheavals and the dynamic new roles played by African-Americans made previously unthinkable claims of freedom and equality seem inevitable. Lincoln is no paragon in Foner's searching portrait, but something more essential-a politician with an open mind and a restless conscience. 16 pages of illus., 3 maps. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Foner's nuanced account contends that Lincoln unwaveringly opposed slavery throughout his life and moved in a consistent, calculated antislavery direction during his presidency. Race emerged as a focal point when it became necessary to convey how enlisting African Americans was vital to saving the Union. (LJ 8/10) (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Renowned scholar Foner (History/Columbia Univ.; Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction,2005, etc.) adroitly traces how personal conviction and force of circumstance guided Abraham Lincoln toward the radical step of emancipation.The author's observation that Lincoln was slow "to begin to glimpse the possibility of racial equality in America" will come as no surprise to academics, but this impressionist portrait of the president vividly details an unexpected aspect of this famous lifehow Lincoln pursued his destiny within the larger antislavery movement, a broad-based network of pressure groups that encompassed everything from abolitionists, who insisted on social and political equality, to racists, who loathed the presence of blacks as a social and economic threat. In the 1850s, Lincoln re-entered politics by identifying containment of the "peculiar institution's" westward expansion as "the lowest common denominator of antislavery sentiment." Foner is particularly impressive in explaining the hesitations, backward steps and trial balloonsincluding placating slaveholding border states and proposing colonizing blacks outside the United Statesthat preceded his embrace of emancipation.While many key events in the legendary career are examinede.g., the debates with Stephen A. Douglasother formerly unnoticed aspects appear in unexpected bold reliefe.g., a thriving Illinois legal practice in which only 34 cases out of 5,000 involved African-Americans. Lincoln's assassination left unanswered how he would have integrated freed slaves into American society. But Foner's summary of his qualities"intellectually curious, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and desirous of getting along with Congress"leaves little doubt that he would have managed Reconstruction better than his haplessly stubborn successor, Andrew Johnson.Look elsewhere for an understanding of the president as person, but linger here for an indispensable analysis of Lincoln navigating through the treacherous political currents of his times.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
