Customer Reviews

Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader & a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery & Save the Union

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a truly fascinating book and an exciting story.
The Kendricks' use letters, articles and mountains of other research to bring these men and their struggles to life. I found myself seeing them not as icons, but as people. It is an exciting story to follow Douglass' mission to make the Civil War about freedom, his son's perilous experiences as soldiers and the Kendricks' interesting take on Lincoln's evolution.
Watching Lincoln through Douglass' gave me a Lincoln I had never seen before. While they do not hold back with aspects of Lincoln on race that may surprise you, he emerges as great because he is not paralyzed by his prejudices as he rises to monumental deeds.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. These two have a true gift for making history interesting and inspiring.

As a student of history, I found this a compelling look at two towering figures and a cogent study of their rarely-explored relationship through the Civil War. Approaching the subject with subtlety and sensitivity, Kendrick and Kendrick make a case for the mutual influence of their dialogue. It was this force that ultimately cemented Lincoln's conviction to continue the war, not just his aversion to breaking the Union. Through new primary sources--unpublished letters, black abolitionist papers--the book provides critical background which gives abolition new resonance.

Douglass and Lincoln is an exceptionally researched and well-written book on the relationship between these two important men. Most of the book focuses on Douglass rather than Lincoln, perhaps necessarily so. The Kendricks do a superb job of tracing Lincoln's slow transformation from a leader reluctant to press the emancipation issue to one who eventually embraced it, all within the context of Douglass's lifelong struggle not only for emancipation, but for equality. Douglass and Lincoln met only a few times, but it's evident in this book that they held a mutual respect for each other due to each man's struggle against adversity in their early lives. I recommend this book not only because it is well-researched, but because it's well-written. It's quite a page turner. I couldn't put it down.

Douglass and Lincoln is a detailed, insightful, captivating, and generally well- and even beautifully written* account of Frederick Douglass's arduous and unremitting efforts to free the enslaved, make abolition a war aim, and arm, protect, and lift up the emancipated; of Abraham Lincoln's fierce determination not to lose the border states to the Confederacy, or to jump ahead of racist public opinion in the North; and of the clash between and reconciliation, to some extent, of the two giants' goals. I recommend it without hesitation.

*I say "generally" because the prose is--infrequently--somewhat overwrought or off the mark dictionwise. I suspect that one of the two authors of the book is not quite as good a writer as the other.

President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass came from two different walks of life and led very different lives. They were both, as Douglass would later describe it, `self-made men' with Douglass rising out of slavery and Lincoln out of poverty to become leading figures of the nation. Lincoln would become a politician and rise to become the sixteenth president of the United States. Frederick Douglass would become a politician too, but not an office-seeking one. He would be on the outreaches of power doing all he could, in his genius, to fight for the enslaved and for justice for all African-Americans. Stephan and Paul Kendrick, father and son, recreate the epic political battles of the Mid-Nineteenth century United States over slavery and the Constitution.

Both Lincoln and Douglass had to overcome many hurdles in life to get to their destinies. Lincoln was born into extreme poverty. He had a cruel and overbearing father who worked all he could out of him until he was twenty-one. Douglass had been born into slavery. He did not even know who his father was, although he had a strong suspicion that it was the man who, by the law, owned him. Both would over come these obstacles on the road to greatness.

Lincoln managed to educate himself and `read law' in order to join the bar and become a frontier lawyer. He would win election to the state legislature and become a vocal minority leader as a member of the Whig Party. He would serve one mediocre term in the United States House of Representatives. In the 1850s, two failed Senate bids, one against the legendary Stephen Douglas, established Lincoln as one of the leading voices against slavery, the expansion of slavery, and slave power. Although against slavery, he had a strong dislike for the radical Garrisonian Abolitionists, who in his view undermined the Anti-slavery movement by making it unelectable, unappealing, and anarchistic.

Douglass managed to escape to chains of slavery and went to the North, where he dodged slave catchers, educated himself, and was found by William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison himself, recruited Douglass into the movement. As time went on, however, Douglass started to become very critical of the movement that he had joined. The Garrisonian abolitionists were pretty good at getting nothing accomplished; they made a lot of people mad at them but did nothing to really damage slavery. Douglass would leave to start his own movement one that would be more mainstream without being mainstreamed.

"To fully break from Garrison and his philosophies was wrenching, but Douglass had tired of conceding to the South their argument that the United States Constitution was a proslavery document. Further, he now resisted William Lloyd Garrison's often expressed notion that seceding from the Union was a viable option for northern states. Instead, Douglass came to view the Declaration of Independence's proclamation that `all men are created equal' as the proper lens though which to understand the essential meaning of the Constitution with the additions of the Bill of Rights." p.44

When Lincoln was elected in 1860, Douglass was disappointed. Lincoln was not really the type of person he wanted as president. Although the most openly anti-slavery president ever elected, Douglass thought Lincoln's approach was too slow and his willingness to enforce fugitive slave laws too cruel.

However as the war went on Douglass's view on President Lincoln began to change, first by meeting him and deciding upon that meeting that Lincoln was nothing if not honest. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Douglass started recruiting young black men, including his own sons, to fight for the Union cause. Douglass would even collaborate with Lincoln in a plan for Douglass himself to go down to the South personally and try to start up a slave rebellion, but the war ended before that became necessary.

"Douglass had clearly made quite an impression on the president. It was now Lincoln himself prompting a second meeting. In thinking about the ease and evident lack of prejudice that marked his meetings with Lincoln, Douglass maintained that this connection was forged in their both being self-made men. Though it might be audacious to compare a president's early days with his own, Douglass was well aware of the grinding poverty of Lincoln's childhood, and he later pondered that this commonality was a source of their ease with one another. Douglass concluded, `I account partially for his kindness to me because of the similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the low rung of the ladder.' So when receiving the invitation, Douglass resolved to go `most gladly.'"

After the war was over, Lincoln would, though some backroom strong-arming, get the eventual Thirteenth Amendment though the Congress of the United States. President Lincoln would not live to see it though; John Wilkes Booth took his life on April 14, 1865. Although he and Lincoln had their differences, Douglass would never have it so good with a president again*. Lincoln's immediate successor was more of villain to his cause than an ally. Douglass would spend the rest of his life fighting for justice and civil rights. He would live until 1895, fighting forever to the end.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested to anyone interested in U.S. history, the Civil War, and centuries-long struggle for civil rights. This book captures the essence of two incredible leaders who lived and lead in incredible times.

*Although, he did have a positive opinion of President Grant.

I learned a lot, not only about Douglas and Lincoln, but also about the environment leading up to and surrounding the Civil War. These were two complex men, each with his own powerful belief system, that found a way to change history, with Douglas significantly influencing Lincoln. It's impossible to fully understand the conditions and perspectives of their time, but this book did a good job of putting me into those times and helped me understand these men and the burdens they carried and the passions they felt. And, it was a pleasant read, a historical page turner.

The book reached me in a timely manner. I bought the book because it was required by our book club, and I didn't expect to enjoy it. But I did. As with most books, some parts dragged a bit, but much was very interesting and insightful.

As the Kendrick's stated at a recent book talk on their new work: 'we often approach this war [Civil War] through the lens of its ending...but it wasn't like this at all at the time.' This book chronicles, in a very enjoyable novel-like way, the constantly shifting dynamics of the War as reflected in the personal relationship of two great men. Not afraid to tackle the folklore that surrounds each man, Paul and Stephen Kendrick provide helpful insight into a profound relationship.

The Kendrick's have composed a compelling and engaging tale of the relationship between Fredrick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln shared during the Civil War period. After reading the novel, my knowledge of the main characters was broadened and I gained a deeper insight into the uniqueness of their bond. As a person who has read a number of Lincoln books, I was most suprised by the excitement with which the author's tell the story. I found myself invested in the outcome of the characters and how they affected each other through the times. Most importantly, the Kendricks wrote a book that is not only intelligently written and important to American history, but one that I could not put down.

As a lifelong Lincoln student, I take strong exception to this sentence from Publisher's Weekly's review: "Lincoln began as a white supremacist who saw Douglass as an exception to the rule of black inferiority." I don't buy either of those assertions. While it is clear that Lincoln's primary goal was to preserve the Union, that merely reflects the fact that secession and war were the most urgent, acute, and critical issues facing him and the nation. Eradicating slavery was always on his agenda; acting on it at the wrong time would only deepen the crisis. After all, much of the North wasn't on board with ending slavery as a goal of the war. As it was, the Emancipation Proclamation stands as the most radical and controversial measure ever enacted by a US president.

Furthermore, I question the academic credentials of the authors as historians: "Paul Kendrick, assistant director of the Harlem Children's Zone, and his father, Stephen, a Boston minister (coauthors of Sarah's Long Walk, about Boston's free blacks) give a thorough look at two unlikely allies." The Kendricks certainly don't seem capable of giving Michael (The Killer Angels) and Jeff Shaara (Gods and Generals) a run for their money.

Again, I haven't read the book yet..and may never. There's an endless supply of thoughtful, well-researched Lincoln books by respected historians, one can afford to be picky. I give it two stars only because I have to rank it somehow and it seems unfair to give it only one based solely on my reactions to the above.