The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

"It’s a brilliant book by one of the most brilliant historians writing about nineteenth century America. The Fiery Trial is a study of a subject that has been much debated over recent years, which is how fervently Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery and how he came to the determination to end slavery, after a life of not being so forward-leaning on the question. The Fiery Trial is an excellent overview of how slavery came to end and Lincoln’s role in ending it. It’s also a fascinating study of the challenges of political leadership, of the compromises Lincoln has to make and the moments he can seize the initiative to drive what Foner defines as Lincoln’s long-held vision of ending slavery. Since the days of Pollard and The Lost Cause , slavery had been portrayed as “a benevolent institution.” That was overturned in the civil rights era of the 1960s. Historians laid bare the cruelty and brutality of slavery. From the civil rights era on, there was also much more emphasis on African Americans as agents of their own destiny, who contested and sought escape from slavery. There was also a return to the recognition of slavery as the major cause of the Civil War. Foner also helped reconfigure our understanding of Reconstruction. Reconstruction had been interpreted for many years as a terrible period during which incompetent ex-slaves were put into office and together with white Northerners exploited oppressed Southern society. The revised version of Reconstruction acknowledged that the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteed African American men the rights of citizenship and the vote, and that their efforts to secure education and protection from the rampant violence directed at former slaves by whites were entirely appropriate. So, Foner and others overturned the notion of Reconstruction, recasting Reconstruction as a time of enormous possibility, during which we could have solved some of the racial dilemmas that still plague the USA today. But the national will for intervention in the South eroded, so the white South once again took control. Through violence, intimidation, imprisonment and economic exploitation, Southerners created a white supremacist system that persisted well into the twentieth century and continues to shape our lives today."