Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

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They were the self-made men of their time. Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than 1 year of formal schooling and became the nation's greatest President. Douglass spent his first 20 years as a slave, had no formal schooling, couldn't read or write and became 1 of America's greatest writers and activists. At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their threshold, Lincoln met Douglass 3 times at the White House and invited him to tea at the Soldier's Home. Their friendship was based on usefulness: Lincoln saw that he needed Douglass to help him destroy the Confederacy and preserve the Union; Douglass knew that Lincoln's shrewd sense of public opinion would serve his own goal of freeing the nation's blacks. Lincoln and Douglass moved beyond the traditional idea of character as fixed and based primarily on heredity and social status and embraced a self in a state of continual evolution. Award-winning historian John Stauffer describes the dramatic transformations in the lives of these giants during a major shift in cultural history, when men rejected the status quo and embraced new ideals of personal liberty.

Reviews

"In this stunning book, John Stauffer has given us the most insightful portrait of either Lincoln or Douglass in years. In graceful prose, he tells a moving story of the two men who dominated Nineteenth century American life -- as allies across the racial divide, friends who drew common inspiration from hard scrabble beginnings and a love of language, and fellow travelers on the road of American self-making. Giants is simply must reading!"--Richard S. Newman, author of Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
"John Stauffer's GIANTS is a lyrical, insightful treatment of the fascinating relationship between two geniuses, one a politician and the other a radical reformer. Both Lincoln and Douglass heard the music of words in their heads as few others, and Stauffer has an ear for the two of them in harmony. That they started in such different places ideologically and yet moved together at the critical moment of emancipation makes this a timely and important book. Stauffer brings the tools of literature and history to bear on this comparison with unmatched skill."--David W. Blight, Yale University, author of Frederick Douglass' Civil War and A Slave No More
"John Stauffer's collective biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln stands apart from other biographies by focusing on how each man continually remade himself, with help from women, words, self-education, physical strength, and luck. In the process Stauffer gives us the texture and feel--a "thick description"--of the strange worlds that Douglass and Lincoln inhabited. The result is a path-breaking work that dissolves traditional conceptions of these two seminal figures (Lincoln the "redeemer" president, Douglass the assimilationist). He reveals how Douglass towered over Lincoln as a brilliant orator, writer, agitator, and public figure for most of his life. He shows us how words became potent weapons for both men. And he tells the poignant story of how these preeminent self-made men ultimately converged, despite their vastly different agendas and politics, and helped transform the nation."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, author of The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century
Like a daguerreotype, which nineteenth-century Americans thought captured not simply surface appearances, but peoples' souls, this book moves beyond biography to allow us to recover the inner lives of two utterly uncommon common men. This is the most insightful book about race and friendship in the nineteenth century that I have read. It's poignant and perceptive, a book to be savored, a book that will last.--Steven Mintz, Columbia University, author of America and Its Peoples: A Mosaic in the Making

Author Bio

John Stauffer is Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Harvard University Press, 2002), was the co-winner of the 2002 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institue; winner of the Avery Craven Book Prize from the OAH; and the Lincoln Prize runner-up.