Eric Foner - The Fiery Trial

This tremendous book by the imminent Columbia historian Eric Foner is the definitve history of Abraham Lincoln and the official end of slavery in our time. According to Foner, before he died, Lincoln endorsed the final victory of abolition: the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery in the United States and the recognition of blacks as US citizens. I hope he is right, for most of us want to believe that Lincoln did grow in his brief Presidency, that he rose above his lifelong abstract and economic only opposition to slavery, belief in gradual and compensated abolition, and desire to colonize blacks. I am a bit dubious about all of this, for it is so easy to go beyond the evidence when you desire to think the best of Lincoln.

Eric Foner – The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Lincoln came from a background that viewed slavery less as a moral problem than an economic problem that hindered white economic advancement. P. 6

Hostility to slavery did not preclude deep prejudices against blacks. P. 7

Eventually, the clash between societies based on slave and free labor would come to dominate American life and shape the mature Lincoln’s political career. P. 9

It seems that Lincoln never had a deep, moral revulsion to slavery. P. 12

Lincoln always seemed to have an independent frame of mind. P. 14

The end of slavery wherever in the North did not include political and social equality for blacks. P. 15

Say what you will about the Constitution, the document did provide several protections for slavery. If the authors thought that slavery was on its way out, they were terribly wrong. P. 15

The South was home to the most powerful slave system the world has ever known. P. 17

Throughout the 19th Century until well into the Civil War, colonization was a pipe dream hope for many hoping for an all-white America. P. 17

Lincoln always said he was always a Whig. Did he ever explain exactly why he was always a Whig? P. 33
I have never understood Lincoln’s fatalistic “doctrine of necessity.” P. 35-36

Was Lincoln a Whig with democratic tendencies? P. 39

Lincoln accepted the racial boundary that excluded blacks from participation in American democracy. P. 39

Non-extension and not abolition was the only Constitutional position available to critics of slavery. P. 42

It was a long process of growth for Lincoln to see blacks not as group of people who had been unfairly removed from their countries of origin and who desired to go back to seeing them as Americans who were home. P. 61

Until well into the Civil War, Lincoln believed that blacks were entitled to the rights given to them in the Declaration of Independence, slavery should be ended gradually and with the consent of the slaveholders, and that emancipation should be coupled with colonization. P. 62

Lincoln was fixated entirely on stopping the expansion of slavery, which put him squarely in the middle of Whig/Republican politics in the 1850’s. P. 86

Amazingly in this country, until after the War there was no commonly agreed upon definition of citizenship and the rights it entailed. P. 93

Americans are bound to each other not by race or ethnicity but by principle. P. 103

Lincoln believed that compromise with the South under the threat of secession was a kind of extortion which would never end. P. 154

On his long trip from Springfield to Washington D.C. to assume the Presidency in February of 1861, Lincoln did little to mollify Southerners, refusing to endorse the Crittenden Plan, refusing to budge on slavery in the territories, and carefully positioning the Union as the victim and the South as the aggressor if hostilities broke out. Lincoln’s action during the secession winter of 1861 will be forever debated. P. 155

“By 1864, nearly 400,000 slaves had made their way to Union lines.” P. 167

In his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln denied that the states had ever been sovereign entities. Lincoln stressed: 1) the supremacy of the national over the state governments 2) the permanence of the Union & 3) the illegality of secession. P. 172

For Lincoln the war was also about the defense of the ethos of free labor. The oblique criticism of slave labor was obvious. But his message did not mention slavery as a cause or part of the war. The only reference was to “slave states.” P. 173

The vagaries of the Confiscation Act. P. 175

The effects of Freemont’s effort to free the slaves in Missouri. P. 176-181

“You must either make yourself the great central figure of our American history for all time or your name will go down in posterity as one who. . . . proved himself unequal to the grand task.” John L. Scripps in a letter to Lincoln in 1861. P. 179

Freemont’s action galvanized the North to a discussion of slavery and divided the people into conservatives and radicals. Freemont’s proclamation opened the floodgates of public discussion of slavery. Lincoln, of course, was still a conservative on the slavery issue. P. 180

Lincoln long favored compensated emancipation and colonization. A plan to so emancipate in Delaware in the fall of 1861 failed. Hence, Lincoln’s ideas of compensated emancipation in the border states were rejected. The Northern whites did not want free blacks amongst themselves. What to do with free blacks? It is startling to think that just 150 years ago the overwhelming majority of whites in this country did not want free blacks living in their midst. P. 184

Lincoln publicly continued to support for colonization as late as December 3, 1861, in his annual message to Congress. P. 186

Anti-slavery feeling intensified in the North in 1862. Criticism increased against Lincoln for not being bolder in acting against slavery. P. 190

Gradual emancipation became national and Republican policy on March 6, 1861, when Lincoln so proposed it and Congress passed the resolution. It seems to me that was a critically important event in the march toward emancipation. Lincoln the conservative continued to favor gradual and not immediate emancipation. P. 196

The DC emancipation law allowed for compensation and colonization. P. 200

As the war continued in the summer of 1862, Lincoln continued to push for compensated, gradual emancipation. P. 212

The Emancipation Proclamation was based on military necessity, not the rights of man. P. 242

According to Foner, Lincoln eventually abandoned the idea of colonization. P. 258
Could/should Lincoln have moved more decisively against slavery, being more aggressive than his insistence that emancipation be gradual and compensated? P. 296
Lincoln grew as President----possessed the capacity for growth- and this is the essence of his greatness. P. 336

One of the saddest things in American history is that we will never know what would have happened during the Reconstruction Era if Lincoln had lived. P. 336