Foner discusses Lincoln?s views on race and emancipation

There are many grounds on which Abraham Lincoln condemned slavery, historian Eric Foner told a mostly first-year crowd that spilled out of Gannett Auditorium and into Emerson and Davis Thursday night. "Moral, religious, political, economic. Lincoln referred to all of them at one time or another. But ultimately he saw slavery as a form of theft, of one person appropriating the labor of another."

Introduced by First Year Experience Director Beau Breslin as a "true giant in the field of American history," Foner was at the lectern chiefly because he had edited the print component of FYE's summer reading, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His Morals. No book of his had ever previously been selected as a summer reading, he said, and he seemed to be genuinely honored.

To illustrate Lincoln's unique place in American history, Foner ? the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and the man who wrote the five-minute history of the nation that plays endlessly in the Hall of Presidents at Disney World -- opened his address with a sampling of headlines from supermarket tabloids. "I Had Abe Lincoln's Baby" was one of them.

Foner's admiration for Lincoln was apparent throughout his talk. "He had one year of formal schooling in his entire life and yet he is probably the greatest writer among our American presidents."

"He never joined a church in his entire life and yet he knew the Bible and could quote it up and down. Like the founding fathers, he was known to be a religious skeptic or a Deist," he continued. "He could never be president today."

"When visited by a group of evangelical preachers who said 'God has told us that you have to free the slaves,' Lincoln responded by asking: "Why hasn't he told me? I'm the guy who has to do this."

Foner is working on another book about Lincoln that will focus on the evolution of his thinking on race and it was on this research, he said, that his remarks of Thursday night were largely based. Anyone who is interested in reviewing the substance of his remarks will find them, he said, in this article in The Nation that was published in conjunction with Lincoln bicentennial in January.

Coming next in FYE's series on Lincoln is a lecture by internationally acclaimed choreographer Bill T. Jones in Gannett Auditorium on Monday, October 26. See details here.