Whereas previous scholars have largely ignored the political character of Lincoln's antislavery argument, Johannsen (history, U. of Illinois) sees Lincoln as an astute and ambitious politician whose statements were delivered almost exclusively during political campaigns to meet political goals. He traces the political dimension of Lincoln's antislavery stance as it evolved from the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 to his election as president in 1860....

"Our country has entered on a new epoch of its history," wrote a Whig Party journal in 1849, just after America's triumph in the Mexican War. Indeed, for that romantic generation of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the Mexican War was a grand exercise in self-identity: it legitimized the young republic's convictions of mission and destiny to a doubting world. It was easily one of the most popular wars the United States has ever fought. This...

Collected from scattered sources throughout the United States, these letters cover the years of Douglas' mature life, from 1833, when the twenty-year-old Douglas, newly arrived in Illinois, recorded the first impressions of his new home, to 1861, three weeks before his death, when as a national leader he sought to rally his section and his party to the cause of the Union. They extol the virtues of Illinois as an agricultural state ; discuss the Mormons'...