Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty

"We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky," said Frederick Douglass in Boston's Tremont Temple on January 1, 1863, awaiting word that Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Bolden adopts Douglass's collective "we" for the narrative voice representing all people -- black and white -- who stood up for "black liberty." Bolden succeeds in taking a complicated story and a dry document (possessing "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading" as historian Richard Hofstadter wrote) and making the narrative interesting, lively, and personal, if sometimes overly casual in tone. The book is chock full of (even overstuffed with) reproductions of photographs, famous documents, paintings, engravings, cartoons, and maps, all thoroughly captioned, offering an album of visuals that make for fascinating browsing. On that snowy day in Boston, Douglass waits all day for the news, and his wait frames Bolden's narrative, the volume ending where it began, with Douglass and many others around the nation receiving good news. In between, is a clear and thoughtful delineation of the moral and political intricacies Lincoln struggled with as he tried to keep the nation from falling apart and find a way to square his personal beliefs with his duties as president. In the epilogue, the narrative voice is Bolden's own, offering a fair-minded assessment of the importance of the document. Match this with Freedman's Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass (rev. 5/12) and Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln. dean schneider