From the two-time winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize, a stirring and surprising account of the debates that made Lincoln a national figure and defined the slavery issue that would bring the country to war. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln was known as a successful Illinois lawyer who had achieved some prominence in state politics as a leader in the new Republican Party. Two years later, he was elected president and was on his way to becoming the greatest chief executive in American history. What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was the campaign he mounted for the United States Senate against the country’s most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas, in the summer and fall of 1858. As this brilliant narrative by the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes, Lincoln would emerge a predominant national figure, the leader of his party, the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation. Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, though he came close to toppling the “Little Giant,” whom almost everyone thought was unbeatable. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas brings alive their debates and this whole year of campaigns and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history. The encounters between Lincoln and Douglas engage a key question in American political life: What is democracy's purpose? Is it to satisfy the desires of the majority? Or is it to achieve a just and moral public order? These were the real questions in 1858 that led to the Civil War. They remain questions for Americans today.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates remain our culture's model of what public political debate ought to be. This new edition of the complete transcripts of the debates and eyewitness interpretations of them (previously published under the title Created Equal?) includes a new Foreword by David Zarefsky. Zarefsky analyzes the rhetoric of the speeches, showing how Lincoln and Douglas chose their arguments and initiated a debate that shook the nation. Their eloquent, statesmanlike discussion of the morality of slavery illustrates the masterful use of rhetorical strategies and tactics in the public forum: a form of discourse that has nearly disappeared from the political scene today.

The Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates of 1858 marked a significant crossroads in the political career of Abraham Lincoln. Though he lost the Unites States senate seat for Illinois to Stephen A. Douglas, the debates launched Lincoln into political prominence and eventually contributed to his successful run for the presidency. This work reveals Lincoln's political evolution during the debates through a narrative approach, evaluating his debate strategy and seemingly inconsistent views on slavery and racial inequality. Organized chronologically, the book examines each of the seven debates individually, acknowledging Lincoln's disappointing turns at Jonesboro and Charleston but celebrating his powerful comeback at Alton in the final senatorial debate.

Previously published in hbk.: Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.

This definitive analysis of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is “one of the most influential works of American history and political philosophy ever published (National Review). In Crisis of the House Divided, noted conservative scholar and historian Harry V. Jaffa illuminates the political principles that guided Abraham Lincoln from his reentry into politics in 1854 through his Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Through critical analysis of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Jaffa demonstrates that Lincoln’s political career was grounded in his commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and abolition. A landmark work of American history, it “has shaped the thought of a generation of Abraham Lincoln and Civil War scholars." To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Jaffa has provided a new introduction (Civil War History). "A searching and provocative analysis of the issues confronted and the ideas expounded in the great debates…A book which displays such learning and insight that it cannot fail to excite the admiration even of scholars who disagree with its major arguments and conclusions."—D. E. Fehrenbacher, American Historical Review

After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, William H. Herndon began work on a brief, "subjective" biography of his former law partner, but his research turned up such unexpected and often startling information that it became a lifelong obsession. The biography finally published in 1889, Herndon's Lincoln, was a collaboration with Jesse W. Weik in which Herndon provided the materials and Weik did almost all the writing. For this reason, and because so much of what Herndon had to say about Lincoln was not included in the biography, David Donald has observed, "To understand Herndon's own rather peculiar approach to Lincoln biography, one must go back to his letters." An exhaustive collection of what Herndon was told by others about Lincoln was published by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis in Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln . In this new volume, Wilson and Davis have produced a comprehensive edition of what Herndon himself wrote about Lincoln in his own letters. Because of Herndon's close association with Lincoln, his intimate acquaintance with his partner's legal and political careers, and because he sought out informants who knew Lincoln and preserved information that might otherwise have been lost, his letters have become an indispensable resource for Lincoln biography. Unfiltered by a collaborator and rendered in Herndon's own distinctive voice, these letters constitute a matchless trove of primary source material. Herndon on Lincoln: Letters is a must for libraries, research institutions, and students of a towering American figure and his times.