San Antonio College Library

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'...

"This comprehensive and scholarly biography conveys ... Douglas's most important achievements, their political ramifications, and historic import." -- Dust jacket.

What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was his Senate campaign 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. Of course, the great issue was slavery....

"Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into...

To understand Abraham Lincoln, one must understand the extraordinary antislavery speech he delivered at Peoria on October 16, 1854. This three-hour address marked the turning point in Lincoln's political pilgrimage, dramatically altering his political career and, as a result, American history. Here, historian Levis E. Lehrman examines the seminal speech and its historical context, arguing that the divide between the statecraft of Lincoln's presidential...