H. W. Brands

From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands, the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, two men with radically different views on how moral people must act when their democracy countenances evil. John Brown was a charismatic and deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to destroy slavery by any means. In 1854, when Congress opened Kansas territory to slavery, Brown raised a band of followers to wage war against the institution--his men tore proslavery settlers from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords. Three years later Brown and his men assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm slaves with weapons for the coming race war that would cleanse the nation of slavery once and for all. Brown's violence pointed ambitious Illinois lawyer and former office-holder Abraham Lincoln toward a different solution to slavery: politics. A member of 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's righteous dignity on the way to the gallows led many in the North to see him 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, and as the nation careened toward war Lincoln would see his central faith, that democracy can resolve its moral crises peacefully, face the ultimate test. Master storyteller H. W. Brands narrates in thrilling fashion how two men confronted America's gravest scourge in the moments before the nation's darkest hour.

John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom

The Zealot and the Emancipator

J. L. Askew

In this book H.W Brands portrays the struggle to end American slavery, comparing Abraham Lincoln, acting in the realm of politics, with terrorist John Brown employing violence, both men striving for the same goal. Although the “Zealot” and “Emancipator” never meet, they get advice and encouragement from a mutual friend, ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, another of the book’s main players. The author deftly weaves the two stories, contrasting their attitudes toward slavery and what they do to end it.
The title employs euphemism and symbolism. Calling John Brown a zealot is understatement, the author conceding in the prologue he “committed murder and treason and tried to start a war of black slaves against white masters.” Likewise, Lincoln as emancipator is more symbolic and mythic than a choice noun for what he accomplished. But the title is effective gaining a reader’s attention.
The text is replete with lengthy quotations, to the extent Brands could be called editor as much as author. While large swaths of quoted material add immediacy, immersing the reader in the past, when done to excess the text becomes tiresome. Writing in the Civil War era was more formal and is stilted to the modern eye. Fans of popular history may get bogged trudging through pages bloated with source documents. But those who make it through should gain a deeper understanding of how abolitionists of different stripes, using different methods, strove to end slavery.
Unintentionally the book reveals how the merely symbolic may eclipse the real in telling human history. For example, Brown’s assault on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry was an insurrection against the government in which four civilians and a U.S. marine were killed. On the other hand, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, despite the flash and bang of artillery, killed no one, but is accepted as the start of the Civil War because the South “fired on the [U.S.] flag”, spurring Lincoln to mobilize the country, calling for 75,000 troops to “put down the rebellion.” Yet Brown’s raid had been deadly, the boldness and violence of the attack showing plainly the Radical Abolitionists would do whatever it took to destroy the South, including fomenting servile revolution.
Only a true statesman could have navigated the country to avoid war, but Lincoln was a politician bent on advancing his own ends, described by a law partner, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” Once he got the brass ring of the presidency, Lincoln was determined to keep the South as part of the American empire he now ruled, even if it meant the most destructive war in U.S. history.
Lincoln was a consummate politician, Stephen Douglas taking note, saying of the Inaugural Speech, “Every point in the address is susceptible of a double construction.” Earlier, Douglas had described the ‘house divided’ speech as “preaching a war of North against the South for the extinction of slavery”, although Lincoln denied this.
The Southern people were not fooled. They remembered the Cooper Union speech of 1860 where Lincoln spoke deceptively, “John Brown was no Republican, and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.” This was patently false because the investigation after the raid had found in Brown’s effects letters and documents from several abolitionist Republicans financing the terrorist. With Lincoln’s election, the party of John Brown was in power, leaving the South the choice of remaining in the Union as a colony of the North, or separating and seeking independence.
The last chapter covers two of Frederick Douglass’ speaking events, one at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington in 1876, and the other at Harper’s Ferry in 1881 at a college for former slaves. Both times Douglass praised John Brown, whom he admired more than the sixteenth president. Brands refers to Douglass’ 1876 speech in the book’s summation comparing the work of Brown and Lincoln, one using violence, the other politics, both on the same trajectory toward ending slavery.
While labelling Brown a “zealot” in the title makes the character more appealing, he was a new breed of assassin, an unrestrained terrorist and the truth of the man is not found in the present book. For interested readers, the most illuminating work on John Brown is “The Secret Six” by Otto Scott.
Calling Lincoln the “emancipator” is the common understanding, although the Emancipation Proclamation was in truth a war measure, yet fraught with symbolism, a bold stroke by the president who would be forever revered as the man who “freed the slaves.” In reality, the black population suffered immensely in the aftermath of the war.
One example is Natchez Mississippi where newly freed slaves overwhelmed the town and were corralled by Union soldiers in what amounted to a concentration camp. Within a year, 20,000 men, women, and children died in what became known as the “Devil’s Punchbowl” atrocity. 
In the devastated South in the years immediately after the war it is estimated as many as one million of the black population died from starvation and disease along with a sizable number of whites.
While the book is a revealing study of two men who never met, both key players in the struggle to end slavery, Brands leans too heavily on the sublimity of Lincoln’s speeches and not enough on tragic outcomes.

Ryan LaFerney

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom is an entertaining and insightful dual biography of radical abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln written by an outstanding historian, H.W. Brands. Brands paints John Brown as the a religious zealot who had rare and progressive views for his time. Brands never champions Browns violent methods but does offer a riveting account of the raid on Harpers Ferry. Where this book shines is Brands assessment of Lincoln. Brands wisely avoids another standard biography of Lincoln, Brands confines himself to a sharp portrait of a fiercely ambitious Illinois politician yearning for electoral office. And it's shocking. It completely up-ends the mythology that surrounds Lincoln. Like nearly all Republicans at the time, Lincoln opposed expanding slavery and, like most, promised not to interfere with it in existing states because the Constitution, a sacred document, protected it. Lincoln considered slavery wrong, but winning elections depended on White voters, so his arguments stressed slavery’s harm to White interests. 

What is fascinating is the comparisons and differences between Brown and Lincoln, which Brands does a great job of highlighting. Brown considered Blacks equal to Whites, while Lincoln favored colonization - believing that, although slavery was wrong, Whites and Blacks could never co-exist (and that Blacks were inferior to Whites). Brown believed violence was necessary to purge slavery from this nation, Lincoln wanted peace but only on his terms: Unionism. And when his terms were clearly not going to be met, war was a price Lincoln was willing to pay – at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, both North and South, soldier, civilian, and slave. And in the end, both men shared a similar fate: they were both killed which turned them into martyrs and legends. Though they never met, Brown and Lincoln both died as martyrs to “slave power,” Brands writes, and spent much of their lives trying to answer the question “what does a good man do when his country commits a great evil?” 

Brands offers a familiar but engaging history about two fascinating historical American figures.

Jeremy Anderberg

“Lincoln wasn’t perfect, but he was perfectly suited to his task.”

Brands started this book with a question that can speak to today’s society just as well as that of the mid-1800s: How does a good man challenge a great evil? Particularly for his subjects and the time period of focus in the book: What was a moral man’s obligation when faced with an immoral institution like slavery?

Lincoln’s relationship to slavery has been subject to plenty of study—both on its own and as part of almost every major biography of the last couple decades. Brands does something unique in his newest book by comparing Lincoln’s moderate, slow-moving path towards emancipation with that of John Brown’s extremist route that ended with his infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry and ultimately his execution by hanging at the hands of the federal government.

Brands goes back and forth between Lincoln and Brown, spending a few chapters at a time on each character. Brown was always a bit eccentric and kooky, but his message of full and immediate emancipation resonated deeply with the abolitionists of the era.

Lincoln was always more of a pragmatist. He seemed to know that abolition must be a more gradual, political endeavor. There was no way to free the slaves without the government’s involvement.

As Brands succinctly notes, “John Brown chose the path of violence, Lincoln of politics.” And yet, the real “answer” is far more complex than just that: both of those paths ultimately led to the Civil War, which was both unconscionably violent and inherently political.

I tend to have a pretty lukewarm relationship with Brands’ books, but The Zealot and the Emancipator is one that I really enjoyed. There are scholarly works available on Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery, but this narrative-driven book gets the job done for the vast majority of readers (myself included). You’ll also learn about John Brown, whose name you might recognize but perhaps not much more than that. His life and the actions that led to his death were of greater consequence than most Americans realize.

The Zealot and the Emancipator John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom

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