With the possible exceptions of Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare, more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other figure in human—certainly American—history. No one, even with the best of intentions, could read them all, or should wish to. Most are pure hagiography, as is to be expected when dealing with one of the nation’s most revered secular saints. Nevertheless, there are some authors whose scholastic rigor allowed them to portray the mythical Lincoln in a more recognizably human light. Some of the works that I found particularly useful included David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln; Stephen Oates’s With Malice Toward None; Kenneth J. Winkle’s The Young Eagle; Paul Simon’s Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness; Jean H. Baker’s Mary Todd Lincoln; and Harold Holzer’s Lincoln at Cooper Union and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
Far fewer books have been written about Lincoln’s greatest—or, at any rate, most frequent—rival, Stephen Douglas. Anyone assaying a study of Douglas’s multifarious career must acknowledge a large debt of gratitude to Robert W. Johannsen, who almost single-handedly has labored to preserve Douglas’s life and letters for future generations. Without Johannsen’s Herculean efforts, the onetime Little Giant of American politics would be even less remembered than he is today. Johannsen’s 1973 biography, Stephen A. Douglas, remains unequaled. George Fort Milton’s The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War, although somewhat dated, is still a valuable study of the political climate that gave rise to Douglas and Lincoln, and Damon Wells’s Stephen Douglas: The Last Years, 1857–1861, is also insightful.
Among the general histories of the time, Allan Nevins’s multivolume Ordeal of the Union remains authoritative, and Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln is a beautifully written modern account of that tumultuous era. Reinhard Luthin’s The First Lincoln Campaign, the only modern study of that epochal election, provides a useful road map to the 1860 race, if skewed rather heavily toward the Republican side of affairs. On matters of purely political partisanship, Michael Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, William E. Gienapp’s The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856, and Eric H. Walther’s The Fire-Eaters and The Shattering of the Union are solid and enlightening works.
To all these authors, and to dozens of others on whom I relied, I offer my sincere professional gratitude.
I would like to thank my editor at Smithsonian Books, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, for her consistent kindness and support—not least of which lay in contributing a far better title for this book than the one I came up with originally. Thanks also to my agent, Georges Borchardt, for his always cogent and courtly advice. Finally, to my immediate family—Leslie, Lucy, and Phil—thanks beyond thanks for giving me the benefit of your wisdom, patience, and love, all of which I needed in copious amounts to complete this book. The dedication at the beginning is slight recompense, indeed, for your unfailingly good-natured and longsuffering support.