Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were the preeminent
self-made men of their time. In this masterful dual biography,
award-winning HarvardUniversity scholar John Stauffer describes the
transformations in the lives of these two giants during a major
shift in cultural history, when men rejected the status quo and
embraced new ideals of personal liberty. As Douglass and Lincoln
reinvented themselves and ultimately became friends, they
transformed America.
Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal
schooling, and became the nation's greatest president. Douglass
spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal
schooling-in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write-and
became one of the nation's greatest writers and activists, as well
as a spellbinding orator and messenger of audacious hope, the
pioneer who blazed the path traveled by future African-American
leaders.
At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their
threshold, Lincoln invited Douglass into the White House. Lincoln
recognized that he needed Douglass to help him destroy the
Confederacy and preserve the Union; Douglass realized that
Lincoln's shrewd sense of public opinion would serve his own goal
of freeing the nation's blacks. Their relationship shifted in
response to the country's debate over slavery, abolition, and
emancipation.
Both were ambitious men. They had great faith in the moral and
technological progress of their nation. And they were not always
consistent in their views. John Stauffer describes their personal
and political struggles with a keen understanding of the dilemmas
Douglass and Lincoln confronted and the social context in which
they occurred. What emerges is a brilliant portrait of how two of
America's greatest leaders lived.
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