By DAVID S. REYNOLDS
Published: September 30, 2010
THE FIERY TRIAL
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
By Illustrated. 426 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95
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 19th 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.
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