Having started reading this, this is my first impression.
He is going to make a Whig interpretation hero out of Lincoln no matter what.
His material leads in the opposite direction, including the few quotations and references from his youth.
Lincoln gradually grows into Abolitionism, and gradually grows into or at least toward Radical Republicanism.
Very fussy mannered historian's nonsense.
Reminds me of Werner Jaeger's Aristotle, The Fundamentals Of The History of His Development, highly regarded in its day.
Stephen A Douglas had his number right from the beginning.
Foner calls it growth, Lincoln out in front of the mandate of his electorate, thinking morally and righteously for them, gradually becoming the abolitionist and radical republican all northern whites should also have been as well from the start.
I still call it hypocrisy and betrayal.
He was the chosen leader of a party founded on abolitionism which could not say its name, "a secret society established in broad daylight", as Arendt cites to Koyre in her chapter The Totalitarian Movement.
Lincoln always denied that he was an abolitionist, anathema to Northern white voters who wanted to be rid of negroes not free them and keep them. So Lincoln was always ostensibly for colonization, especially in public, but among the elite of his own party there was never support for that. And once they recognized the voter bonanza of freed negroes, the colonization jig was up.
In my view, the secret strategy was always, and had always been, merely to render illegal any movement of negroes into Northern states. As Foner recounts, Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky, and probably the rest, already had such laws on their books, and it's fair to say, having read Tocqueville, that the white northerners adored them.
Thus the Republican secret plan was to free the negroes, but force white Southerners to deal with them into eternity. The corrollary was that no negroes were going to be allowed into the territories or into new states as formed.
It was going to be a Southern problem for Southerners. And that was in fact the way it remained for about fifty years.
In order for Foner to make his case of growth into abolitionism he has to deny or undercut Douglas' arguments about the abolitionist conspiracy to form the Republican Party, arguments Douglas made against Lincoln, and Lincoln denied, in the debates.
Let's read those sections of Foner's book to confirm that he does that!
Why not smoke him out!
After all, when the South seceded, more or less upon Lincoln's election in 1860, they didn't resort to that desperate measure for their health, thinking him a moderate gradualist who might some day grow dangerous! Insiders like Douglas knew the score.
As I suspected, Foner discusses the debates, makes Lincoln look mostly good, Douglas mostly bad, Dred Scott an abomination of jurisprudence, the Republican conspiracy, discussed only in isolated sentences here and there is never seriously scrutinized for its veracity.
It is a rambling shambling account, more Foner, and his emplacement of a brand on Southern losers, Taney, and Democrats, his vindication of Jefferson and New England regarding slavery, than either Lincoln, Douglas, the substance of the debates and the basis for their mutual allegations, or history as it was lived. It is a pastiche.
For Foner's theory, Lincoln cannot have been a secret and conspiring abolitionist politician early, in 1854, as Douglas had laid out, because he then cannot grow into one late.
But Foner does not even give a real sniff of this huge Republican bi party abolitionization issue. Foner, p.106. Yet his footnotes show that he was familiar with the sources, even Zarefsky.
One important point that Douglas made, even in the first debate as well, that is often glossed over in claiming that Lincoln was no abolitionist, was that Liincoln's grounds for abhorring Dred Scott were identical to those of the abolitionists, that it deprived negroes of the rights and priviileges of citizenship.
Foner admits that it had not been the jurisprudence of any state, except one, or of the federal government, to grant negroes the right to vote, and for the rest negroes had always been denied rights and privileges by everyone, but fails to draw Douglas proper conclusion, even from this obvious example, that Lincoln and the Republican Party were a secret abolitionist society.
Only a very radical immediate abolitionist would have thought that negroes should be immediately freed and given full rights of citizenship. But that was Lincoln's fundamental objection to Dred Scott and to the whole Supreme Court. Foner has to try to avoid this interpretation by dancing all around the concept of citizenship, turning it into a complex fantasmagoria within which Lincoln's remark recedes into the murky distance, but no American back then doubted that white people could have or get citizenship in variious states but that negroes could not, even if freed by their owners, and many states put restrictions on that.
Douglas' claim of a Republican conspiracy, and Lincoln's part in it, to abolitionize both parties was true.
Lincoln's of a Democratic conspiracy to nationalize slavery was false, but it scared his electorate into electing him in 1860.
Foner's account of A House Divided is not an early signal of the secret society program the Southern Democrats recognized when he won in 1860.
Rather, according to Foner, it was a very different message for the rank and file, it was rhetoric which all Americans, in Arendt's vast deceived electorate front organization, were each supposed to individually struggle with, in their own broken hearts.
Lincoln needed to grow, through long struggle, to overcome his own institutional racism, and aberrant urge to colonize them, to later become the good abolitionist radical republican racial equalitarian Americans all now and should admire.
