‘How does a good man challenge a great evil?” Fittingly, H.W. Brands asks this question at the outset of “The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom.” The great evil was slavery, and the subjects of Mr. Brands’s dual biography were the two most famous martyrs in the struggle against it. Recounting their parallel lives, Mr. Brands offers two diametrically opposed answers to his initial question. Lincoln once compared slavery to a poisonous snake coiled in the bed with...

Source: Wall Street Journal October 04, 2020 20:26 UTC