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The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, c. 2010. Pp. [xxii], 426. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-393-34066-2; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0393-06618-0.)
It is said that only Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare have more written about them than has Abraham Lincoln. With the recent bicentennial of the sixteenth president's birth and the accompanying flurry of new books, Shakespeare must be worried about his number-two ranking. Thus, what more, or new, can be said about Lincoln?
Lincoln has always been elusive, and in a vast literature one can find almost any Lincoln and some historical evidence to support that interpretation. While Lincoln was a tight-lipped politician about his own personal views and feelings and while he did not leave a diary, he did leave a large correspondence as well as an accumulated contradictory oral history and collected remembrances of the martyred president. Lincoln has become a mythic cultural figure for the United States-the president who saved the Union and freed the slaves-and we historians often project onto Lincoln our greatest hopes and fantasies, and even our worst fears, of who we are personally and who we are as a nation.
Interpretations of Lincoln have changed over time. For some, Lincoln has gone from the Great Emancipator to the Great White Honky. With the civil rights movement, historians' interests shifted from slavery to race, and Lincoln's more gradualist policy was seen as inadequate-so much so that in 1979 Lincoln scholar Mark E. Neely Jr. found the Great Emancipator characterized as "the perfect embodiment of Northern racism" in Leon F. Litwack's pathbreaking book North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961) (Neely, "The Lincoln Theme Since Randall's Call: The Promises and Perils of Professionalism," Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 1 [1979], 10-70 [quotation on 60]). Now Eric Foner, one of the most respected and influential historians of the United States, has entered directly into this fray.
Foner has served as president of three major history associations-the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians-a recognition almost unheard of. He has written more than twenty books; many are very well known and well read (and required reading by...