The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom
- ISBN-10
- 0525563458
- ISBN-13
- 9780525563457
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 480
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-10
- Publisher
- Anchor
- Author
- H. W. Brands
Description
"What do moral people do when democracy countenances evil? The question, implicit in the idea that people can govern themselves, came to a head in America at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the struggle over slavery. John Brown's answer was violence--violence of a sort some in later generations would call terrorism. Brown was a deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to do whatever was necessary to destroy slavery. When Congress opened Kansas territory to slavery, the eerily charismatic Brown raised a band of followers to wage war against the evil institution. One dark night his men tore several proslavery settlers from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords, as a bloody warning to others. Three years later Brown and his men assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the goal of furnishing slaves with weapons to murder their masters in a race war that would cleanse the nation of slavery once and for all. Abraham Lincoln's answer was politics. Lincoln was an ambitious lawyer and former office-holder who read the Bible not for moral guidance but as a writer's primer. He disliked slavery yet didn't consider it worth shedding blood over. He distanced himself from John Brown and joined the moderate wing of the new, antislavery Republican party. He spoke cautiously and dreamed big, plotting his path to Washington and perhaps the White House. Yet Lincoln's caution couldn't preserve him from the vortex of violence Brown set in motion. Arrested and sentenced to death, Brown comported himself with such conviction and dignity on the way to the gallows that he was canonized in the North as a martyr to liberty. Southerners responded in anger and horror that a terrorist was made into a saint. Lincoln shrewdly threaded the needle of the fracturing country and won election as president, still preaching moderation. But the time for moderation had passed. Slaveholders lumped Lincoln with Brown as an enemy of the Southern way of life; seven Southern states left the Union. Lincoln resisted secession, and the Civil War followed. At first a war for the Union, it became the war against slavery Brown had attempted to start. Before it was over, slavery had been destroyed, but so had Lincoln's faith that democracy can resolve its moral crises peacefully"--
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2020-10-06
- 464 pages
- Ebook
- Anchor
Similar books
-
Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution
By H. W. BrandsOur First Civil War reminds us that before America could win its revolution against Britain, the Patriots had to win a bitter civil war against family, neighbors, and friends.
-
The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
By H. W. BrandsHalleck to McClellan, Feb. 19, 1862, Official Records, 1:7:637. 167 “This operator afterwards proved". Memoirs, 219. 168 “Why do you not obey my orders... at Fort Henry”: from Halleck, March 4, 1862, Official Records, 1:10(2):3.
-
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
By H. W. BrandsA biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt examines his political leadership in a dark time of Depression and war, his championship of the poor, his revolutionary New Deal legislation, and his legacy for the future.
-
Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Heroic Struggle for America's Heartland
By Peter CozzensTecumseh and the Prophet presents the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat--the two most significant siblings in Native American history, who, Cozzens helps us understand, should be writ large in the ...
-
Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American...
By H. W. BrandsFrom New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of ...
-
Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West
By H. W. BrandsIn Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West.
-
Lincoln's Mentors: The Education of a Leader
By Michael J. GerhardtHe threw his support to Adams—unsurprising given that Adams was the only other candidate who had supported the infrastructure program that Clay favored. Due to Clay's support and influence in the House, Adams became president, ...
-
The Centurion's Wife (Acts of Faith Book #1)
By Janette Oke, Davis BunnJanette Oke has dreamed for years of retelling a story in a biblical time frame from a female protagonist's perspective, and Davis Bunn is elated to be working with her again on this sweeping saga of the dramatic events surrounding the ...
-
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong ...
-
Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
By David S. ReynoldsBut if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life.