Free The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner

Acknowledgments
    B EGINNING WITH MY FIRST WORK OF HISTORY, a study of the ideology of the Republican party before the Civil War published four decades ago, Abraham Lincoln has played an important part in my historical scholarship. But until now, he has not occupied center stage. Nonetheless, like so many other students of the American past, I have always been fascinated by Lincoln and what his life tells us about our society and its history.
    In writing this book, I owe my greatest debt to the legions of historians who have studied, from every possible angle, Lincoln and his era. I want to single out for special thanks a number of scholars who have published books during the past decade or so that make available previously inaccessible documentary sources related to Lincoln: Michael Burlingame, for editing a series of volumes of writings by persons close to Lincoln; Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, for compiling and evaluating later recollections of Lincoln’s words; Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, for gathering and publishing the interviews conducted by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon; and the staff of the Lincoln Legal Papers project, who have produced in digital form the records of Lincoln’s law career.
    Indeed, thanks to the digital revolution of the past decade, a vast array of primary sources relevant to the study of Lincoln are now readily available online, making the task of the researcher immeasurably less onerous. I thank John Tofanelli of the Columbia University Libraries for assisting me with research on digital sources. Incongruous as it may seem, much of the research for this book in online resources such as the Official Records of the Civil War, the Congressional Globe , and the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, as well as Lincoln’s Collected Works at the website of the Abraham Lincoln Association, was conducted in the spring of 2008 when I was fortunate enough to serve as a Leverhulme Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary University, University of London. I thank the Leverhulme Trust and my colleagues at Queen Mary for making this possible. Thanks, too, to the American Civilization Department at Harvard University, which invited me to deliver the 2009 William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization, where I presented some of the ideas in this book, and to Columbia University, whose Tenured Faculty Research Program helped to defray research expenses.
    I am deeply indebted to friends and colleagues who generously read the entire manuscript of this book and offered valuable corrections and suggestions: Alan Brinkley, Andrew Delbanco, Peter Field, Melinda Lawson, Olivia Mahoney, Bruce Miroff, Mark E. Neely Jr., and James Oakes. I have benefited from many conversations about the writing of history with Judith Stein on the way to and from our weekly tennis matches. I also wish to thank scholars who responded to my requests for information and shared the results of their own research: A. J. Aiseirithe, Gregory Baggett, Elizabeth Blackmar, Michael Burlingame, Eduardo Posada Carbo, Harold Holzer, Frank Safford, Lea VanderVelde, and John Witt. Thanayi Jackson and Benjamin Soskis tracked down elusive material for me at the Library of Congress and National Archives. Peter and Philip Kunhardt, Olivia Mahoney, and Susan Severtson helped me to assemble the images in this book.
    I owe a special debt of gratitude to my literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra (my classmate at Long Beach High School a number of years ago), for her encouragement, and to Steve Forman, my editor at W. W. Norton, who offered sage advice at every stage of this project. Thanks also to his able assistant, Rebecca Charney, and to Mary Babcock, the excellent copy editor for this book.
    As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Lynn Garafola, and daughter, Daria Rose Foner, not simply for being willing to live with Lincoln, as it were, for several years, but for serving as sounding boards for my