RaveThe New York Review of BooksThe central theme of The Fiery Trial is Lincoln’s \'capacity for growth\' in his \'views and policies regarding slavery and race\' ... No one has written about this trajectory of change with such balance, fairness, depth of analysis, and lucid precision of language as Foner has done in The Fiery Trial. The minefield of Lincoln studies is filled with partisan and polemical writings through which Foner has carefully made his way and emerged without a scratch ... His book is anything but tedious, and the skill of his pen carries the reader along in this narrative of America’s most important and dramatic achievement presided over by its greatest president.
Manisha Sinha
PositiveThe New York Review of Books\"For the past half-century the abolitionists’ image has continued to improve, culminating in this prodigious work of scholarship ... This book is not for the faint of heart. Ten years in the making, its 275,000 words of text and 140 closely printed pages of endnotes are encyclopedic in both the positive and negative meanings of the word. Every antislavery organization that ever existed is here, listed by initials after the first mention ... While these and many similar paragraphs contain useful information, the reader’s eyes tend to glaze over. To cite an old cliché, it is often difficult to see the forest for the trees. Embedded among those trees, however, are several important motifs that add up to a comprehensive interpretation of the abolitionist movement ... Of all the names of abolitionists and antislavery politicians scattered through The Slave’s Cause—well over a thousand—one name is conspicuously missing, that of James Ashley, the congressman from Ohio who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment to passage... Despite this omission, Manisha Sinha has cemented in place the last stone in the scholarly edifice of the past half-century that has rehabilitated the abolitionists’ reputation.\
