| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Ed. by Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xlviii, 341 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03355-1.)
This edition of the Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates surpasses all previous editions and establishes the standard text for the foreseeable future. Tens of thousands of citizens attended the debates held in seven communities across Illinois between August 21 and October 15, 1858. Since the candidates almost always spoke extemporaneously, their remarks would not have assumed their canonical status in American political rhetoric if two Chicago newspapers had not received dispatches from skilled reporters who heard and transcribed the debates. Transcripts of the debates published in the pro-Lincoln Chicago Press and Tribune and the pro-Douglas Chicago Times provide the only extant contemporary accounts of what the candidates said.	1
Many more people read the debates than heard them, especially after May 1860 when Lincoln assembled for publication a scrapbook of the newspaper reports of the speeches, his from the Press and Tribune, Douglas's from the Times. Lincoln chose speeches from the newspaper sympathetic to each man presumably because the account in the unsympathetic newspaper differed or might be thought by readers to differ. Generations of scholars accepted Lincoln's editorial decision and referred to the partisan-friendly version of each man's speeches for parsing, rumination, and philosophizing. In The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete Unexpurgated Text (1993), Harold Holzer demonstrated that the unfriendly newspaper's version of each man's speeches did indeed deviate from the friendly version, sometimes significantly.	. . .

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