'The Fiery Trail,' by Eric Foner
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 24, 2010
The Fiery Trial
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
(W.W. Norton & Co.; 426 pages; $29.95)
Hating poverty, greed, war or slavery does not necessarily make one deeply principled in knowing how to end them. Abraham Lincoln hated slavery from his earliest reflections; of that there is no doubt. There is also no doubt that Lincoln was absolutely crucial to the ultimate timing and the manner in which American slavery ended in the Civil War.
But, as Eric Foner's new book, "The Fiery Trial," demonstrates, all great changes in human affairs happen in history and through time. Lincoln's ideas regarding race and slavery underwent significant change over the course of his political career; indeed, Foner argues that Lincoln's "greatness" rests in his "capacity for growth," not in the consistency that many have wished to see in him.
Foner, one of our most respected historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, has written a distinctive and valuable book, showing persuasively that we should not understand Lincoln from the myth-glazed outcome reading backward, but from the beginning, through one transformative event after another, looking forward. This is a historian's book, a lesson in context, but one hopes it will be widely read.
How he got there
Foner characterizes his book as "less and more than another biography"; it is surely not a biography, not a study of Lincoln's personal or psychological burdens with slavery or any other question. Lincoln scholarship is too often awash in romantic interpretations from right, left and middle. Even Lincoln's vaunted moderation, a well-earned reputation, has sometimes been savored as a national treasure.
Foner steadfastly avoids the pathos or drama, the sheer narrative appeal, of Lincoln's poetic and tragic story. He takes on the most sensitive subject in Lincoln scholarship (his role as author of the Emancipation Proclamation), and tries, almost to a fault, to de-sentimentalize it. This book is about policy, not the person, ideas, not the life. Foner has written a book that readers may yet find moving and rewarding if they want to witness a master historian at work showing, rather than merely telling, us how to understand one of the greatest problems in American history.
A signal accomplishment in this work is Foner's contextualization of Lincoln's ideological roots in the Whig party of Henry Clay. Lincoln was a firm believer in the political economy of the Whigs. The use of government to advance development and opportunity, the theory of "harmony of interests" in a market economy, advocacy of protective tariffs, moral reforms like temperance, and the celebration of "self-made men" were all Whig ideas that shaped Lincoln's political outlook. Moreover, when Lincoln witnessed a speech by Clay in Kentucky in the 1840s and heard him call slavery a "great evil," abolitionists an "equal danger," and colonization (removal of blacks from the country) the solution to the race problem, Lincoln had a blueprint for his career. But blueprints have a way of dissolving as they collide with history, especially for ambitious politicians in revolutionary times.
Foner reveals a public Lincoln who is vehemently anti-slavery without being a real abolitionist, a man who repeatedly advocated the "natural" rights (life, liberty, fruits of their toil) of blacks, but opposed their exercise of "civil" and "political" rights (equal access and the vote). Lincoln's political career emerged as Illinois and the slavery expansion question took center stage in American politics.
Effect of abolitionists
In eloquent speeches, Lincoln served as a rhetorical guide to how and why the American republic destroyed itself over the future of free versus slave labor. Foner astutely exposes how Lincoln discussed slavery primarily as an "abstraction" and rarely as a world of daily oppression and the violence of the master-slave relationship. But a thread running throughout the book is the developing influence that radical abolitionists and their ideas had on Lincoln, moving him, both grudgingly and eagerly, toward a greater egalitarianism. It has long been a cliche to say that Lincoln was a man of his time and region in his attitudes about race, but Foner shows us just what that means in a carefully layered analysis.
Lincoln was not stuck only in his times. His presidency, Foner contends, is a study in the necessary, alternately reluctant and willing, making of the Emancipator. Lincoln pressed for colonization more steadfastly than many Lincoln scholars are yet willing to admit. He advocated, and authorized planning for, voluntary black removal down to the very moment of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. Lincoln understood that to defeat the South, slavery would have to be destroyed, despite how firmly it was protected by the Constitution. The question was how. He preferred a gradual (he hatched one plan that would take 37 years), compensated emancipation, with slaveholders paid for their property and as many African Americans as possible colonized in Central America, the Caribbean or Africa.
Foner illuminates how Lincoln worked assiduously, with and around the Constitution, for a "two-pronged approach" - this gradual emancipation plan in the non-Confederate border slave states, and general, military emancipation in the 11 states "in rebellion." As Foner suggests, "contradictions" are "inevitable in a moment of radical change." The pressure of thousands of runaway slaves, the hard lobbying of abolitionists, the sheer scale of the war, and Lincoln's own moral will and political courage ushered him to the very result he claimed he least wanted - a "remorseless revolutionary struggle" that required abolition at the point of federal bayonets, and not by the choice of slaveholders themselves.
Degrees of influence
Like other works on the crowded Lincoln shelf, Foner demonstrates the president's masterful use of public letters to help shape public opinion toward the radical goal of emancipation, and he touts his leadership in the passage of the 13th Amendment, which declared the end of slavery everywhere with the authority of the Constitution. We learn from some poignant detail how Lincoln may have been influenced by meeting several accomplished black leaders, and especially how the enlistment and heroism of black soldiers helped sustain the president's commitment to emancipation against enormous pressures to give it up in 1864, and made him a modified advocate of black suffrage by 1865.
There are moments when one wishes that Foner might interpret even further some of the pivotal changes in Lincoln's trajectory, rather than merely reconstruct them. Lincoln's worst racial moment had to be a meeting he held with five African American ministers from Washington, D.C., in August 1862, at which he blamed the war on blacks, insisted the races must be "separated," and tried to recruit the churchmen to volunteer for colonization. The closest we get to this author's explanation is that Lincoln in that tense month "almost seemed to be arguing with himself." Foner is so disciplined in keeping his work sentiment-free that he often lets Lincoln's stirring eloquence simply speak for itself with only sparing commentary.
But on his central argument - Lincoln's extraordinary moral and ideological growth - Foner convinces from behind and through the evidence. To a radical Republican who urged him to "stand firm" against calls to backtrack on emancipation, Lincoln wrote: "I hope to 'stand firm' enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause." That in a nutshell is Lincoln. And thus was he also the man described by a former slave after the war. Had Lincoln "considered it too humiliating to learn in advanced years," said the freedman, "our race would yet have remained" in slavery. Foner's book gives Lincoln, with help from his friends, the credit he is due for joining, leading and explaining the most dramatic transformation in American history.