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The Debates that Defined America
Simon & Schuster
February 2008
On Sale: February 5, 2008
416 pages
ISBN: 0743273206
EAN: 9780743273206
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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. Lincoln
challenged Douglas directly in one of his greatest speeches
-- "A house divided against itself cannot stand" -- and
confronted Douglas on the questions of slavery and the
inviolability of the Union in seven fierce debates. 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. Of course, the great issue between Lincoln and Douglas was
slavery. Douglas was the champion of "popular sovereignty,"
of letting states and territories decide for themselves
whether to legalize slavery. Lincoln drew a moral line,
arguing that slavery was a violation both of natural law and
of the principles expressed in the Declaration of
Independence. No majority could ever make slavery right, he
argued. 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.
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