The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

During the last few years a combination of factors, including the national celebration of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, has triggered an avalanche of books about the country's sixteenth president. Eric Foner has now written the best one yet published on the critically important subject identified in its subtitle: Lincoln's views about and actions regarding chattel slavery in the United States. Aimed at a general audience, the book is clearly and accessibly written, shrewd and nuanced in argumentation, and filled with invaluable detail about its subject.

Foner mostly abjures explicit contestation with other authors, even in his notes. Even so, he counterposes his emphasis on Lincoln's transformation over time with unnamed writers who treat Lincoln as a fixed quantity, someone whose words and deeds can be explained “primarily in terms of his own character, psychology, legal training, or political philosophy that remained constant throughout his life” (p. xvii).

Foner's Lincoln is very much the product of his specific time and place. The book's first chapter, which depicts the political atmosphere of the upper South and lower North where Lincoln grew to adulthood, is an especially rich and valuable contribution. But that region and the country as a whole were extremely dynamic socially and politically, and that dynamism also left its mark on Lincoln's views, which changed significantly over the course of his life.

In tracing that evolution, Foner carefully distinguishes Lincoln's views from those of more politically conservative figures, including not only northern Democrats but also Lincoln's putative idol, Henry Clay, and any number of more cautious Republicans, including the man he chose as his secretary of state, William H. Seward. Foner also contrasts Lincoln's opinions and outlook with those of abolitionists, Republican radicals, slaves, and freedpeople. The words and actions of these latter groups formed important parts of the historical context and influenced Lincoln's own thoughts and decisions. Over time, Lincoln moved in their direction, but his outlook and program never coincided with theirs and his intellectual-political journey toward them included “sideways and even backward steps along the way” (p. xx).

Foner shows that during the 1830s and 1840s Lincoln held views about slavery and race that were common among mainstream northern Whigs. He disparaged slavery and opposed its expansion but assumed that the federal government had no right to touch slavery within the states. In an episode that Foner addresses rather fleetingly, Lincoln endorsed Henry Clay's 1850 collection of compromise measures even though they contravened his own stated opposition to enabling slavery's expansion. And until the last few years of his life Lincoln also held that blacks were not equal to whites in either abilities or rights and that free blacks and whites could not live together in peace. He therefore continued to support plans for the voluntary emigration (“colonization” abroad) of former slaves.

Until the middle of the 1850s, Lincoln also refused to prioritize the whole subject of slavery, showing no inclination to define his party or determine his partisan loyalties in accordance with it. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 (which made possible slavery's spread into lands closed to it for more than three decades) changed that orientation. It was at that point that Lincoln's evolution accelerated. He initially called for reinstituting the provisions of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had barred slavery only from the northerly reaches of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. By the time he joined and began to build the new Republican party, however, he had exchanged that very limited goal for the party's more sweeping refusal to countenance slavery's expansion into any federal territory. During the late 1850s, Lincoln opposed calls to dilute that platform for the sake of winning more votes.

Foner usefully emphasizes Lincoln's recognition that effective political leadership required not only winning office and enacting needed measures but also striving to educate the general public. But the author also notes that during his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln was not above speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the subject of racial inequality. During the secession crisis, Lincoln refused to endorse the slavery-friendly Crittenden Compromise for the sake of avoiding or halting disunion, but he declared himself willing to allow slavery to expand less dramatically (into the new state of New Mexico) for the same purpose.

Abolitionists and Radical Republicans looked on the outbreak of the Civil War as a crucial opportunity to destroy chattel slavery and revolutionize the South. Lincoln, Foner notes, did not. He believed that an unscrupulous minority was responsible for secession and that a war program that avoided antagonizing the presumably loyal Southern white majority would allow that majority to reassert itself and bring the South back into the Union. Once that happened, the Republicans could resume their peaceful political effort to block slavery's further expansion. Lincoln reconsidered that strategy only in the middle of 1862, when its inadequacy became apparent to him. At that point, he embraced a more radical, emancipationist war policy, including the enlistment of black men in Union armies. That epochal decision also led him to cease public advocacy of colonization.

During the war, Foner also shows, Lincoln's evaluation of black people, their capabilities, and their appropriate place in American society was also changing. By the beginning of 1864 he was voicing his personal wish to see freed black workers be treated “precisely as I would treat the same number of free white people in the same relation and condition” (p. 288). And by the end of the war, he was urging (although not insisting) that at least some black men be allowed to vote in reconstructed Southern states. But he never endorsed calls to break up the great plantations and distribute their lands to the former slaves—a measure dear to the hearts of freedpeople. At the end of 1863, he offered to allow new, loyal Southern state governments to impose discriminatory apprenticeship laws on former slaves “as a temporary arrangement” in hopes of thereby bringing the war to a speedier end (pp. 269–272).

This dramatic, very impressive, but also complex political record makes it very difficult to summarize Lincoln's politics simply, which makes Foner's success at explicating and analyzing it all the more impressive. In my opinion, that same record helps explain (and support) Frederick Douglass's later judgment that Lincoln was a man of “exalted character and great works,” was “our friend and liberator,” but “was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model.”