Enslaved people found ways to ameliorate the worst conditions of slavery. They did so despite being subject always to the terrible violence that underpinned the entire institution. They formed networks of family, kin, and communities within and across plantations and between towns and cities. They forged a culture that drew from Africa and the Americas, one that was rich enough to yield the music and dance of gospel, blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop, dominant even today in popular culture.

All of these efforts propelled the abolitionist movement, which attracted free Black and white people on both sides of the Atlantic. That movement had its first successes in North America during the American Revolution, when, in 1777, the state of Vermont began to end slavery. Other northern states followed soon after. Widespread debate over the morality and necessity of slavery meant that, when the US military expanded into the western territories of indigenous people, slaveholders insisted it was their right to take enslaved people there. ‘Free staters’ were equally adamant that slavery ought to stop at the borders of the new territories.

When the discordant notes reached the crescendo of war, enslaved Black Southerners immediately began to flee to the Union lines. At first, the US government declared them to be contraband; enslaved people were literally confiscated property, the spoils of war. But in time their sheer numbers and their self-evident usefulness to the US military saw them emancipated.

Abraham Lincoln and John Brown (Wikimedia Commons)

Lincoln’s change of heart on the meaning of the Civil War forms the moral heart of Brands’s book. Some eighteen months into the bloody war, Lincoln drafted a statement that would free all people enslaved in places controlled by the secessionists. And yet Lincoln remained steadfast that this action was neither an anti-slavery nor anti-racist gesture: it was a measure necessary to win the war by depriving white Southerners of an essential workforce. To critics in the North who had little interest in ending slavery, he wrote: ‘I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.’

It was only late in the war, after the battles turned in favour of the United States and against the Confederacy, that Lincoln pushed through the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery (for all ‘except as punishment for a crime’) and, in a brief inaugural address in March 1865, warned that the war might yet drag on ‘until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword’.

Brands does little to explicate Lincoln’s change of heart. He suggests mildly that circumstances enabled the president to cleave together his official duty with what he once called ‘my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free’ (Lincoln’s emphasis).

Instead, the book juxtaposes Lincoln’s political ‘pragmatism’ with Brown’s dogmatism. Brown, who was executed in 1859 after a siege at an armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was single-minded about the moral bankruptcy of enslavers and their self-justifying ideology. Unlike many white people who favoured the abolition of slavery, Brown was also anti-racist. Drawing a few dozen men, white and Black, to his cause over the second half of the 1850s, he fought to keep Kansas free of enslavement. His final stand was an uncharacteristically inept military exercise, but one whose object – the abolition of slavery and equality and justice for enslaved people – terrified Southern enslavers and wealthy landowners.

Brands, an experienced historian, is the author of dozens of books. His prose fairly rolls along, gathering momentum thanks to lengthy quotations of the superb oratory and written words of his two chosen subjects. A large cast of minor characters appears, but only when they too left behind some sparkling observations about Lincoln or Brown.

Such a tight focus makes for a readable book, divided handily into fifty-seven chapters. But it means that Brands elides bigger questions about the origins of abolition and the complex relationship between abolition and anti-racism. When enslaved and free Black people hailed Lincoln as ‘the Great Emancipator’, they forced his hand rather than reflecting Lincoln’s own beliefs. In other words, Lincoln’s decisions to help free enslaved people were forced on him in no small part by the actions of those enslaved people and their allies.

Although the subject of this book is expressly the choices made by men of conscience, there is curiously little attention devoted to the ‘immoral institution [of] slavery’. The question about the role of violence in ending slavery, for example, is one Brands addresses in terms set by Lincoln. It was ironic, writes Brands, that while Lincoln condemned Brown’s violence, it was Lincoln, who followed ‘the peaceful path of democratic politics’, who was now responsible for a war including slaughter ‘a thousand times greater than anything John Brown ever committed’.

What, one might ask, of the violence and death perpetrated by the slave trade and two centuries of enslavement? Brown’s actions look less ‘zealous’, and perhaps indeed more moral when set against the deaths of millions of people and the grotesque violence that underpinned the entire regime of enslavement.

One might instead turn Brands’s question inside out and ask: what is a moral historian to write in immoral times? Whose voices are worth listening to? Whose stories ought we be telling? And what questions do we think are important? In an era when claims for basic natural rights are asserted under the straightforward banner Black Lives Matter, do we really need another book, however adroitly written, about Lincoln and Brown?

For readers interested in questions of morality and the history of abolitionism, I recommend Manisha Sinha’s prize-winning The Slave’s Cause (Yale University Press, 2016). For a tale of John Brown told, importantly, through the eyes of an enslaved Black character, there’s James McBride’s National Book Award-winning novel, The Good Lord Bird (2013), recently turned into a rollicking seven-part television series (Showtime/Stan, 2020).