Foner tackles what would seem to be an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and manages to cast new light on it ... Because of his broad-ranging knowledge of the 19th century, Foner is able to provide the most thorough and judicious account of Lincoln’s attitudes toward slavery that we have to date ... More cogently than any previous historian, Foner examines the political events that shaped Lincoln and ultimately brought out his true greatness.
Foner not only illuminates Lincoln’s developing views on the question of slavery, but also places him in the broad context of America’s most divisive and consequential political conflict ... We come to understand, in Foner’s telling, the extent of slavery’s dominion in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the enormous obstacles that slavery’s enemies would face ... Foner is the leading authority on this period of our history, and interested readers could have no better guide through the thicket of action that propelled Lincoln to the forefront of American politics and the country into the cauldron of civil war.
The 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.
