Synopsis

ABOLITION tells the story of two friends, their accomplishments and their conflicts, during the tumultuous decade leading up to the Civil War. One of the friends is John Brown - he whose "body lies a-mouldering in the grave" - who led the raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, a major stepping stone toward the War. The other is Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave in Maryland, escaped to freedom at age 20, and became an important intellectual, journalist, political maven, and arguably the greatest American orator of the Nineteenth Century. The bond and the strife between these two men is explored in an intimate re-imagination of this crucial era in our fraught history.