Parallel biography lincoln and douglas

Parallel biography lincoln and douglas: In this masterful dual biography,

Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal schooling, and became the nation's greatest president. Douglass spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal schooling-in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write-and became one of the nation's greatest writers and activists, as well as a spellbinding orator and messenger of audacious hope, the pioneer who blazed the path traveled by future African-American leaders.

At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their threshold, Lincoln invited Douglass into the White House. His last public appearance came on February 20,when the delegates to the National Council of Women meeting in Washington, DC, invited him to the podium, where he received a standing ovation. Later that day he died at home from a massive heart attack.

Parallel biography lincoln and douglas: Our interview with author John Stauffer

Duncan R. Issue This bibliographic essay originally appeared in the September issue of Choice volume 56 number 1. He tried over and over again to escape and finally succeeded, only to face the deprivations of a runaway until he was made a free man by legal means and was able to begin a self-actualizing life at last. With his eloquence and passion, partly learned by observing black revival preachers of the time and also liberally sprinkled with sharp humor, Douglass quickly rose to prominence in the abolitionist North and made such a reputation that when he went to call on President Lincoln, he was brought to the head of the line.

As he passed forward, he heard his fellow petitioners refer to him as a simply "the nigger. Lincoln had risen from the plainest poverty, son of a backwoods family whose greatest ambitions were to become shopkeepers on what was still the frontier land of the midwest. Men made their names by being fierce and violent, by drinking and fighting one another in bouts that had no rules except the assertion of total physical dominance.

Lincoln was called on to participate in one such rough and tumble, but by insisting on fair rules of "wrestling" rather than the lawlessness of the usual brawls, he emerged as a local hero. Finding himself with little talent for commerce, he chose politics as a way to earn a living and learned he had a gift for debate, combining a natural intelligence with a folksy bent for telling tales.

Like Douglass, Lincoln was not only tall, as is well known, but also physically powerful and unafraid. Like Douglass, he had to make an "escape" from the woods to the town and finally to the city, where, like Douglass, he found a constituency. The author points out that both men altered their speech patterns and accent as they rose to national recognition.

Parallel biography lincoln and douglas: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were

Lincoln would have talked like a Shakespearean bumpkin with harsh enunciation and truncated consonants, while Douglass was very conscious of the nuance of gentlemanly speech as opposed to the sloppy patois of the slave quarters. Douglass spent the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal schooling-in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write-and became one of the nation's greatest writers and activists, as well as a spellbinding orator and messenger of audacious hope, the pioneer who blazed the path traveled by future African-American leaders.

At a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their threshold, Lincoln invited Douglass into the White House. Lincoln recognized that he needed Douglass to help him destroy the Confederacy and preserve the Union; Douglass realized that Lincoln's shrewd sense of public opinion would serve his own goal of freeing the nation's blacks.