The Zealot and the Emancipator

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

By: H. W. Brands

Narrated by: Robert Fass

Master storyteller and bestselling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln—two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin.

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. When Congress opened Kansas territory to slavery in 1854, Brown raised a band of followers to wage war. His men tore pro-slavery 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 a race war that would cleanse the nation of slavery.

Brown’s violence pointed ambitious Illinois lawyer and former officeholder Abraham Lincoln toward a different solution to slavery: politics. Lincoln spoke cautiously and dreamed big, plotting his path back to Washington and perhaps to the White House. Yet his caution could not protect him from the vortex of violence Brown had set in motion. After Brown’s arrest, his righteous dignity on the way to the gallows led many in the North to see him as a martyr to liberty. Southerners responded with anger and horror to a terrorist being made into a saint. Lincoln shrewdly threaded the needle between the opposing voices of the fractured nation and won election as president. But the time for moderation had passed, and Lincoln’s fervent belief that democracy could resolve its moral crises peacefully faced its ultimate test.

The Zealot and the Emancipator is acclaimed historian H. W. Brands’s thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom.

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln courtesy of the White House Collection/White House Historical Association
https://library.whitehousehistory.org/fotoweb/archives/5017-Digital-Library/Main%20Index/Portraits/5.tif.info

Accelerate and enjoy

The narrator speaks very slowly, but once I accelerated it to 150% it went very nicely.

I importance of Browns crazy last adventure to Lincoln's strategy is, to me, imperfectly drawn Still, great story, with independent slant and focus on Lincoln. But read also Team of Rivals.

Outstanding

I learned so much about Lincoln. Love how author leans on letters and speeches and contemporary accounts.

Excellent!

Being an admirer of both Abraham Lincoln and John Brown I was eager to read this book. I was not disappointed.

It was very well written and I enjoyed the way the author tied stories together of these great men. Even though I have read many biographies of Lincoln and Brown I still learned a lot from this book.

The narrator, Robert Fass, was very good and made this an easy listen.

Do yourself a favor and purchase this audiobook.

White Folk Fight - Mostly Not About Black Humanity

Compelling, fascinating dialectic exchange about the predominant views on race and slavery before during and after the Civil War. So often found myself listening to cold arguments over unity and power, economics, security, violence, white rights to be paid for labor, or for cheap cotton generated from black labor. So often left feeling a deep longing for more arguments based on the humanity of enslaved people.

But this is what our country was. Is. Fights about laws that mostly leave humanity outside the debate.

Sad. True. America

Dr Brands delivers AGAIN!

The Zealot and the Emancipator gives the reader a sense of the vigor which Brown possessed and the hesitancy that Lincoln pursued trying to deal with the Peculiar Institution. There are some great nuggets of context with which Dr. Brands brings both of these men of the mid-19 Century alive! The relationship between Stephen Douglas and Mary Todd gives the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 a whole new spin! Great job Dr. Brands!