The President and the Freedom Fighter

 

I just finished reading David Kilmeade’s The President and the Freedom Fighter, which looks at the Civil War through the evolving perspectives and actions of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  It is a fascinating read.  In just about 250 pages, it presents key people and events before, during, and after the Civil War and explores how Lincoln and Douglass saw the issues of slavery and emancipation.  It reads like a novel.

Douglass, an escaped slave who became a major public figure, believed in immediate emancipation.  Lincoln, a self-made lawyer and politician, was concerned about the bringing the Union back together.  He worried that immediate emancipation would make it impossible for southern states to re-join the Union and cause some northern states to join the Confederacy.  He wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and kept it in his desk drawer, awaiting a time when it would be accepted as a solution rather than as an irritant.

The story of these two leaders and the environment that shaped their lives before, during, and after the Civil War, is powerful.