The Fiery Trial Quotes

“The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.13”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome, Elements of Political Economy, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.)”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. Lincoln”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Our government,” Lincoln declared, “rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.” The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats’ “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion” until it no longer valued the central ideal of equality.52 Like the abolitionists, Lincoln saw public sentiment as the terrain on which the crusade against slavery was to be waged.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Belknap replied, “Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion.” Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement’s greatest orator, was “to alter public opinion,” to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically “possible,” the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.42”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves…. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, December 1, 1862”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Alvan Stewart, a prolific writer and speaker against slavery from New York, developed the argument that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which barred depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law, made slavery unconstitutional. Slaves, said Stewart, should go to court and obtain writs of habeas corpus ordering their release from bondage.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. The Proclamation also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 in bondage.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“The assumption that the slave is in a better condition than the hired laborer, includes the further assumption that he who is once a hired laborer always remains a hired laborer; that there is a certain class of men who remain through life in a dependent condition…. In point of fact that is a false assumption. There is no such thing as a man who is a hired laborer, of a necessity, always remaining in his early condition. The general rule is otherwise. I know it is so, and I will tell you why. When at an early age, I was myself a hired laborer, at twelve dollars per month…. A young man…works industriously, he behaves soberly, and the result of a year or two’s labor is a surplus account. Now he buys land on his own hook…. There is no such thing as a man being bound down in a free country through his life as a laborer…. Improvement in condition…is the great principle”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“He accused Democrats of attempting to “dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man…to make property, and nothing but property of the Negro in all the states of this Union.” In the rhetorical high point of the seven debates, he identified the long crusade against slavery with the global progress of democratic egalitarianism: That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world…. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings…. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.30 While”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Despite the onset in 1857 of an economic downturn whose effects still lingered in Illinois, the candidates completely ignored economic matters. As Blaine recounted, they did not mention “protection, free trade, internal improvements, the subtreasury, all the issues, in short, which had divided parties for a long series of years.” The debates focused on “one issue” and one alone, Blaine continued, thus reflecting “the public mind” of the late 1850s. Indeed, in Lincoln’s correspondence with constituents and party leaders in 1858, slavery and the rights of blacks were virtually the only matters to receive attention. Overall, the debates offered a serious public discussion of the most fundamental problem dividing the nation and the first real gauge of the impact of the Dred Scott decision on American politics. As a Washington newspaper observed, thanks to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Illinois “becomes, as it were, the Union.”22”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“It does not stop with the negro…. So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can…. Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position…. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal…. I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.20”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“We shall lie down,” Lincoln warned, “pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.” Lincoln”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South. Have we no tendency to the latter condition?13”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Only once before, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review, had the Court invalidated an act of Congress on constitutional grounds. John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts dissented; Curtis was so outraged by the decision that he resigned from the bench. Much”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Lincoln, who had always craved recognition, had found his life’s purpose. The “higher object of this contest,” he wrote, “may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But…I am proud…to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see.” There was no mistaking that the “consummation” Lincoln envisioned was the eventual eradication of slavery, not simply a halt to its expansion.51”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. “They are just what we would be in their situation,”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.26”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Taken by surprise,” as he put it, and unwilling to see the possibility of electing an antislavery senator disappear, Lincoln ordered his backers to cast their votes for Trumbull, ensuring his victory on the next ballot.23 If this episode demonstrated anything, it was that prior political affiliations constituted a major obstacle to antislavery cooperation. The outcome left Lincoln bitterly disappointed. But his willingness to sacrifice personal ambition for political principle reinforced his standing among those opposed to the expansion of slavery.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“These victories arose from the determined efforts of a group of lawyers who risked public odium by defending fugitive slaves in court and challenging the long-standing system of black indentured servitude. John M. Palmer, Gustave Koerner, and Orville H. Browning, all future Republican politicians, argued that blacks held to long-term indentures were free, and fought their cases in court without charge. In the 1850s, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon represented fugitive slaves pro bono.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son’s eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs—storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor—essential to the market economy.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic. Condemnations”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Americans, Lincoln warned, had fallen victim to “wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of the courts.” If respect for the rule of law disintegrated, the stage would be set for the emergence of an ambitious tyrant, a “towering genius” who would seek to gain a place in history even greater than the founders by “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” The remedy was for Americans to rededicate themselves to the rule of “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” and make respect for the rule of law their “political religion.”60”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“In keeping with the exceptionalist vision of nationhood so common in postrevolutionary America, he proclaimed that the founders had put in place a political system more conducive to liberty than any in history. His generation’s duty was to preserve this “political edifice” and bequeath it to the future. The greatest danger to its continued existence lay within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Where”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Abolitionists seized on the weapons available to them—petitions, lectures, and the newly invented steam press, which made possible the mass production of pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides—to challenge the conspiracy of silence that increasingly barred discussion of slavery from the national public sphere.43 The movement appealed simultaneously to the hearts and minds of Americans, excoriating slaveowners and exposing the brutal reality of slavery—whippings, separation of families, and so on—while”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“But the abolition laws of the other northern states freed no living slave. Rather, slave children born after a specified date would work for the mother’s owner as indentured servants until well into adulthood (age twenty-eight, for example, in Pennsylvania, far longer than what was customary for white indentured servants), and only then would become free. Most Latin American nations also allowed slaveholders to retain ownership of existing slaves, as well as the labor of their children for a number of years. These laws, in effect, required slaves to compensate their owners for their freedom by years of unpaid labor. As one official wrote, they “respected the past and corrected only the future.” In”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Max Weber defended the social utility of the politician’s calling and identified three qualities required for success: devotion to a cause; a sense of responsibility; and judgment, or being attuned to the consequences of one’s actions. These usefully define Lincoln’s own qualities as a politician. Yet Weber concluded by noting the symbiotic relationship between political action and moral agitation. “What is possible,” he wrote, “would not have been achieved, if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.”8”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery