Fiery Trial

 

Eric Foner, “Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” W.W.Norton & Co; 2010, 345 pp. 

In the preface to The Fiery Trial, Eric Foner states his intention to trace "the evolution of Lincoln's ideas and policies about slavery from his early life through his career in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, his term in Congress in the 1840s, his emergence as a leader of the new Republican party in the 1850s, and his presidency during the Civil War".  The book closely examines Lincoln's speeches and writings as they relate to his evolving position on slavery in the context of his political career.

Lincoln was a moderate, attempting to bridge the gap between the abolitionist Radical Republicans and conservative Democrats, including those in the slave-holding states, whom he hoped would choose preserving the Union over steadfastly defending slavery.   Lincoln initially supported the idea of voluntary colonization of freed blacks to Africa or South America, a stance supported by almost all politicians at the time that felt slavery was wrong. However, Lincoln eventually abandoned his moderate stance on slavery when he determined that to win the Civil War, he needed to act to end slavery.  Lincoln was sincere in his stance that the Union was fighting the war to preserve the Union, not to challenge slavery where it already existed.

 

My Notes:

Pg. 3f:  Lincoln was born in 1809 in a Kentucky log cabin.  When he was seven, his family moved to south-western Indiana, where Lincoln spent the remainder of his childhood.  In 1830 his father moved the family to central Illinois.  Here Lincoln lived until he assumed the presidency in 1861.

Pg. 13:  So, before Lincoln’s emergence in the 1850s as an antislavery politician, he had lived in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, all of which had histories of slavery and severe laws effectively denying black persons the rights of citizenship.  All three, in fact, at one time or another prohibited free blacks from entering their territory. 

Pg. 16:  The US Constitution contained several protections for slavery, notably the fugitive slave clause, which required the return of runaways and the three-fifths clause, which gave the slave states increased representation in Congress and added electoral votes by counting part of their disenfranchised slave population. As the nation expanded westward, so did slavery.  Cotton became by far the most important American export, an indispensable source of the foreign earnings that enabled the country to import manufactured goods.  Even the abolition of the slave trade from Africa in 1808 did not slow slavery’s growth.  A flourishing domestic slave trade replaced the importation of slaves.  By the eve of the Civil War, the slave population in the US had reached nearly four million.

Pg. 17:  Increasingly, supporters of emancipation coupled their proposals with ‘colonization’—the removal of the black population from the US.  Until around 1830, most organized antislavery activism among white Americans took place under this rubric.  At mid-century, the prospect of colonizing American slaves seemed more credible than immediate abolition.

Pg. 62:  Until well into the Civil War, Lincoln would continue to adhere to the outlook that blacks were entitled to the basic human rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, slavery should be ended gradually and with the consent of slaveholders, and abolition should be accompanied by colonization. 

Pg. 63:  In 1854 Stephen A. Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act which explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1821, substituting for the ban on slavery what Douglas called ‘popular sovereignty’—the right of settlers in all western territories, north or south, to decide for themselves whether to allow or prohibit slavery. 

Pg. 72:  Between the ratification of the Constitution and 1854, nine new slave states had entered the Union and the slave population had grown from 700,000 to over 3 million. 

Pg. 74:  Before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures, not the voters, chose US Senators. 

Pg. 144:  By the time Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, seven slave states had declared their independence and formed a new nation. 

Pg. 184:  Lincoln attempted to secure land for a colony of blacks in Guatemala.  One Guatemalan asked why the Lincoln administration did not settle blacks in its own western territory.   Then in Lincoln’s December 3, 1861, annual message to congress, he urged them to provide funds for the colonization of slaves freed under the Confiscation Act or whom the border states decided to emancipate, as well as backs already free who might desire to emigrate.  Lincoln also called for extending diplomatic recognition to Haiti and Liberia, partly, it is plausible to assume, to improve prospects for black emigration to these countries. 

Pg. 224ff:  On August 14, 1862, in a meeting with black delegates, Lincoln declared, because of white prejudice “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being place on an equality with the white race….It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”  Then on August 20, 1862, Lincoln replied to an article by Greeley: “I would save the Union in the shortest way under the Constitution….My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.  If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that.  What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union….I have her stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

 

 

 

 

The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 277) was a territorial organic act that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska.  The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had outlawed slavery in the territory north of latitude 36°30' north (except for Missouri).

Pg. 70:  in 1784, Thomas Jefferson had unsuccessfully proposed to bar slavery from all the western territories then part of the US.  However, he also had a persistent reluctance to endorse action against slavery in Virginia, the protection for slave property written into the Luisiana Purchase treaty of 1803 and his support at the time of the Missouri debates for slavery’s westward ‘diffusion’ on the patently absurd grounds that this would improve the condition of the slaves and weaken the institution. (The Northwest Ordinance enacted in 1787 successfully barred slavery in territories north of the Ohio River).

Pg. 230f:  On September 17, 1862, the Union won the bloodiest war yet at Antietam.  Lincoln then felt he could issue the emancipation edict as it would now not look like an act of desperation, and he did so on September, 22^nd.  (Of course this edict did on affect the 500,000 slaves in the four border states and West Virginia). 

Pg. 252:  By the war’s end, more than 180,000 blacks had served in the Union army—over one-fifth of the nation’s adult males under age forty-five and about 10 percent of all the soldiers who fought for the Union.