Primary Sources, Black History

Join The Gist of Freedom host, Preston Washington and author Dwight Zimmerman.  In The Hammer and the Anvil, the award-winning author Dwight Jon Zimmerman vividly depict the tumultuous time through the lives of two men who defined it: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The Hammer and the Anvil reveals that its protagonists each wrestled with the question of slavery from a young age. Douglass, a slave who was spared no brutality, once fought an especially cruel master and eventually escaped north to freedom. Lincoln, who was hired out by his father to do manual labor on neighbors’ farms, found this harsh life intolerable. As a senator, Lincoln sought ways to end the westward spread of slavery, believing that adding free states to the Union would diminish poverty and the power of Southern states. Douglass was less patient. He had become a skilled orator and an influential editor of Northern abolitionist journals, and called on white Americans to honor their nation’s founding commitment to liberty.