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$29.95., ... My review will conclude with some thoughts about the most startling sentence in the book. Of all the great historical figures in American history, few (if any) have had as much ink spilled analyzing their accomplishments as Abraham Lincoln. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. There’s no reason to doubt his declaration: “I am naturally antislavery. Anthony Romanelli Dr. Clemons AMH2020 9:05-9:55 AM “The Fiery Trial” Book Review "By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, he addressed a divided nation" (Ch. Review Dated: 19th, August 2003 Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10 [ Good ] Total Score: 7 Average Score: 7.00. Some people love books. Lincoln, whose life in Foner’s hands is stripped of all but it’s most essential element. This information about The Fiery Trial shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. I had long wondered why he didn't fight the war from the beginning as a war to free the slaves. "The Fiery Trial" delves deeply into Lincoln's views on slavery, and traces his attitudes as they evolve from his early years right up through his last speech as President. Start by marking “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery” as Want to Read: Error rating book. Still, he was reluctant to take dramatic action against it, unlike some of the radicals within the Whig Party. 5 pg. The Fiery Trial is not a biography in the traditional sense, but was all the more effective for that. Slavery was the hot topic in politics of that time period just as the debate over abortion or gay marriage is today. October 4th 2010 These views stayed with him when he became president but with the beginning of war a new concern emerged, the border states. This book helped me understand that question. 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. “A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. While it does recount numerous missteps and wrong-headed policies that Lincoln supported over the course of his career, it does so with the purpose of giving us a greater insight into what the true source of his greatness was. While I've read many of the primary documents before, it is nice to have these particular ones gathered together so you can see the development of Lincoln's abolitionism--but more than that, his understanding of African Americans as "citizens" of this nation who deserved not o. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery Eric Foner, Norton, $29.95 (448p) ISBN 978-0-393-06618-0 . He comes through as a real person, real politician and not the "saint" of whom he is popularly. It helps to humanize a man that many of his contemporaries found to be unknowable and in doing so, helps us understand more about the changing world he lived in. 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. Prior to becoming president Lincoln firmly believed that slave owners should be compensated if slaves were freed and he strongly supported colonization efforts to remove freed slaves out of the U.S. The Fiery Trial is one of the many supplements the British company will produce for the line. It is not another biography of Lincoln, but a story about his changing views on slavery. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning book specifically about Abraham Lincoln and his evolution about slavery and racism. Along the way it is apparent that Lincoln learned from his experiences and that his views changed as the world around him changed. 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. 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. 5 pg. The book is a “narrow” biography—it doesn’t trace all of Abraham Lincoln’s life, but instead uses his speeches, letters, and other writings to trace the evolution of his thinking and beliefs on the issue of slavery. The last book I read by him I struggled to finish. . 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. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, This book is a study of American slavery and the political events that shaped Lincoln's attitude toward it. He needed to keep the border states. 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. The great figures of history, as Melville wrote, “are parts of the times; they themselves are the times, and possess a correspondent coloring.”. 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. This is an excellent book both for understanding the evolution of Lincoln's thinking on slavery and on African-Americans and for recognizing just how important the border states were to him, both as a man from the border and overall in terms of how their remaining in the Union affected the Civil War. This book explains the development of Abe Lincoln’s views on slavery before he became president and how they changed once he was president. The Fiery Trial is not, strictlyspeaking, a biography of Lincoln; the attention is always focused on hisrelationship to slavery, with other aspects of his life and personalityrefracted through that question. In terms of content, it gave a clear sense of how public opinion shifted during the course of the run-up to the start and during the war, especially how the bravery of Black troops in battle challenged racial assumptions. "The Fiery Trial" delves deeply into Lincoln's views on slavery, and traces his attitudes as they evolve from his early years right up through his last speech as President. Where Isaacson was intent on telling a "Great Man" story and lost the richness of the Italian Renaissance somewhere in the process, Foner shows us Lincoln as a deeply flawed human being with the great strength of l. I read this right after finishing Walter Isaacson's extremely disappointing Leonardo Da Vinci biography, which perhaps sharpened my appreciation of just how much this book gets right. He points out that only a handful of whites in that era espoused racial attitudes that today would be considered consistently progressive. That's as it should be: progress means addressing the flaws of the past. Lincoln was better than most of his contemporaries on the issue of slavery, but never where we wished he would be from our modern sensibilities. In his teaching and scholarship, Foner focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. This led to a modified freedom of slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation where only slaves in areas of rebellion were freed. 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. The United States was going through hard times of dealing with slavery in the 1800’s. I love Foner and this book did not disappoint. Slavery was the hot topic in politics of that time period just as the debate over abortion or gay marriage is today. 2010. His authority in the subject has been recognized by the three major professional historical organizations and he is one of those rare authors who have been awarded both the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes in the same year. We’d love your help. and Ph.D. In exploring Lincoln Foner adopts a minimalist approach that limits his narrative arc to the tight confines of Lincoln’s thinking on the issue of slavery and how this thinking evolved over his lifetime. It turns out that the historical reality is a bit more complicated than that. Lincoln at first acted to end slavery out of economic and political concerns but later came to realize that slavery was morally wrong as well. These views stayed with him when he became president but with the beginning of war a new concern emerged, the border states. Above all, he treasured the American Union. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Fiery Trial – Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery at Amazon.com. Some people fall in love. . As usual what I thought I knew about Lincoln, slavery, and abolition turned out to be a bit simplistic. See all 3 questions about The Fiery Trial…, Best Presidential Biographies (nonfiction), Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, Romance Readers' Most Anticipated Books for May. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published The greatness of Lincoln becomes apparent in his ability to perform the almost impossible task of steering a moderate course through this treacherous time, doing his best to keep the extremes at the table in an environment where it appeared that almost nobody was happy with his reluctance to support their extreme. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Reynolds-t.html, Most Read: Michael Lewis’s ‘The Premonition’. This is an extensive, almost comprehensive, analysis of these matters. I've read a lot of reconstruction narratives and Lincoln stories and even Foner's own work, but this information was so well put together and vivid and new. This book is a study of American slavery and the political events that shaped Lincoln's attitude toward it. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Editorial Reviews. Lincoln once declared that he couldn’t control events; they controlled him. In fact, his views on African Americans would shock most Americans today. Eric Foner’s “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery” was published in 2010 and received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for history. 'The hallmark of Lincoln's greatness was his capacity for growth," says Eric Foner, in the keystone statement of "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery." It is written with a master historian's balance and objectivity, revealing more about Lincoln than I had realized after reading quite a bit about him. With his characteristic command of the era’s ideological texture, Foner transports readers of The Fiery Trial back to the 1850s, where some senators think the Declaration of Independence a subversive document. The Fiery Trial is not a biography in the traditional sense, but was all the more effective for that. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. From the Publisher "[A] searching portrait." In this book, Foner examines Lincoln's thoughts and attitudes toward slavery from early in his life up to the moment he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and beyond. by W. W. Norton Company. I suspect that, at some level, Eric Foner was always going to write this book. It's so well written and so informative. However, Foner's Lincoln is both an attempt to rediscover the central importance of slavery in Lincoln's thought and also to employ the force of the "Lincoln legacy" in the cause of moderate politics in America today, a sphere increasingly fractious as the recent economic downturn has heightened the stakes of every political decision. One the one hand, Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. I'm not a big Eric Foner fan. The Fiery Trial is not a biography, and the author has succeeded more than most in placing Lincoln in the context of the attitudes of those around him. As it is often assumed that Lincoln was an abolitionist, this book shows clearly that he was not. But I can't imagine that any of them does a better job than this book of answering the question most likely to arise for today's reader: what did Lincoln do about slavery? He also shows how they reflected the attitudes he found around him and were influenced by his determination to hold the union together. Foner recounts that Lincoln actually had very little contact with black slaves or freemen before his presidency. Foner's book tries to bridge that gap, describing Lincoln as … “The Fiery Trial”, historian Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Abraham Lincoln, is a lucid, well written exploration of a man compelled by circumstances and his own natural inclinations to grow. I read this right after finishing Walter Isaacson's extremely disappointing Leonardo Da Vinci biography, which perhaps sharpened my appreciation of just how much this book gets right. Foner shows Lincoln in conversation with Radical Republicans and grassroots Abolitionists, and demonstrates how pressure from these groups - along with the necessities of the war - pushed Lincoln from his initial lukewarm anti-slavery positions (he favored gradual emancipation with financial compensation to slaveholders and the immigration of freed slaves to Africa or Central America) to his eventual issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the ratification of the 13th Amendment, and the endorsement of (limited) voting rights for Black men that Lincoln expressed in his final speech. Well it is a good thing that Abraham Lincoln was not around now or everyone's favorite president would definitely have been cancelled due to his implicit (maybe explicit) condonation of slavery. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. The United States was going through hard times of dealing with slavery in the 1800’s. 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. Historians have long been puzzled by apparent inconsistencies. There are many biographies of Lincoln to choose from. The United States was going through hard times of dealing with slavery in the 1800’s. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) by the American history scholar Eric Foner received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History. THE FIERY TRIAL ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND AMERICAN SLAVERY. adroitly traces how personal conviction and force of circumstance guided Abraham Lincoln toward the radical step of emancipation. This book fills a massive need in Lincoln scholarship and answers the question: how precisely progressive or racist was Lincoln? To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.13”, Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award (2011). The main theme of this book is Lincoln's evolving attitudes toward race and slavery throughout his career. The Fiery Trial is a 128-paged paperback. Abraham Lincoln's definitive role in the Civil War and emancipation have given him a central place in the American imagination and turned him into an almost mythological figure in United States history. I can't imagine a better book about Lincoln and the meaning of the Civil War. 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. 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. Abolitionists, neither of which seemed that interesting much scholarship to contend with it is often assumed that 's. 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