Reddit reviews The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

I recommend the book The Fiery Trial by Foner on Lincoln's developing views on slavery. When he entered the White House, he considered slavery deeply immoral, and a stain on the national character. But he also saw no way to legally end slavery. Only when the war drug out and the South wouldn't come back into the Union did he see the opportunity provided. I too am from the South, and I'm familiar with all the arguments as to why it wasn't "really" about slavery. Lincoln waged war to protect and preserve the Union, but the South seceded over slavery. So the war did boil down to slavery.

James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is immediately the first book that comes to mind. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it is “the book” to read on the Civil War. It is a highly readable account of the build-up to the Civil War, causes, and the war itself. It also won a Pulitzer Prize. For more, I’d also check out Ta-Nehisi Coate’s online book club on Battle Cry of Freedom over at The Atlantic.

Other excellent works on the period I would recommend are:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin: an account of the Lincoln administration during the war years
  
  
• The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner: details Lincoln’s career and his relationship and views on slavery.
  
  
• Fall of the House of Dixie by Bruce Levine: takes a look at the southern plantation economy and its destruction in the Civil War
  
  
• This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust: Harvard President and historian Faust looks at how the nation collectively dealt with the death of 600,000 young men and the national trauma of the war
  
  
• Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams: an older book, but still a classic on the Union command structure and Lincoln’s difficulty in choosing an effective commander for the Union Army
  
  
• Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy: for the military side of the conflict without much historiography
  
  Also, the Civil War produced some of the greatest memoirs in American letters:
  
  
• Grant’s Memoirs: written after his presidency with the assistance of Mark Twain, who later compared them to Caesar’s Commentaries
  
  
• Sherman’s Memoirs: called by literary critic Edmund Wilson a fascinating and disturbing account of an "appetite for warfare" that "grows as it feeds on the South"
  
  
• The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government by Jefferson Davis: a massive tome of a book in which Davis lays out his rational for secession (in hindsight) and upon which much of the Lost Cause mythology would later be based
  
  And, I always recommend reading poetry and fiction, so I would also encourage you to look at Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, as well as the war poetry of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, particularly Melville’s poem The Martyr, written days after Lincoln’s assassination. More contemporary fiction would be Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, or EL Doctorow’s The March.
  
  Finally, check out David Blight’s Open Yale Lectures on the Civil War. Prof. Blight is a fantastic lecturer. They are free, and the course syllabus is online, and in 26 hours you can take a full Yale course completely on your own.
  

Hey bud, can we pretend I wasn't a dick and continue this conversation? I know I didn't represent myself well, but I was genuinely curious as to how one can come to the conclusions that you have. Like I said earlier, I am a big fan of Lincoln and I just came across this book written by Eric Foner (the same author of the history textbook that I linked) called The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery and was wondering if you have read it as it seems to hold the same view as I've had and has won multiple awards including the Pulitzer Prize. I find myself wondering if my point wasn't made well and there was a misunderstanding in which you thought I was trying to say that Lincoln went from being a fan of slavery to being an abolitionist. I am definitely not saying that, and I'm sorry if I made it seem that way. All I was trying to say was that Lincoln, in so few words, went from being ok with letting slavery just kind of eventually die off on its own accord to being an abolitionist who believed slavery needed to be ended now. The South was more about fighting the Civil War to keep their slaves via individual state's rights, but Lincoln was more about fighting to keep the Union in tact than it was about slavery, but that isn't to say he didn't care a great deal about slavery, he just cared more about the sanctity of our union. I believe the source you provided supports that last sentence, but I admit I could have some other things wrong.

I dunno dude, this whole interaction just never sat well with me. If I argued my point so poorly that you felt comfortable inferring I was racist, then I must have really fucked up. I'm sorry for not considering earlier that I wrote my arguments poorly. I care enough to write this almost a month later and with my tail between my legs. I admittedly am not a historian, but I do enjoy history and if I have something wrong about one of my favorite political figures of all time, I'd really like to know.

Hope you can sense my sincerity in this. I genuinely want to respectfully discuss the history as I'm running into conflicting sources and am left scratching my head a bit.