Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America

Allen C. Guelzo

may 2010 · Simon and Schuster

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From the two-time Lincoln Prize–winning historian, “an astute, gracefully written account of the celebrated Lincoln–Douglas debates” (Publishers Weekly).

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.

The one-term congressman quickly rose to fame thanks to his US Senate campaign against the country’s most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas. As the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes in this stirring narrative, Lincoln would emerge as the leader of his party, and the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation.

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. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas brings these debates alive and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history.

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Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at
Gettysburg College, where he also directs the Civil War Era Studies Program and
The Gettysburg Semester. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer
President (1999) and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of
Slavery in America (2004), both of which won the Lincoln Prize. He has
written essays and reviews for The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, Time, the Journal of American History, and many other
publications.