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Scarce unsigned book: Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, In the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois. First edition, first issue (with no line over publisher's information on copyright page, a “2” at the bottom of page 17) Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster and Company, 1860. Hardcover, 6.5 x 9.25, 268 pages. The first free-end page bears a pencil ownership signature dated to Peoria, Illinois, in 1860, and an affixed bookplate for the “Private Library of George P. Hambrecht,” a lawyer and politician from Madison, Wisconsin (1871-1943) who gathered a very large Lincoln Collection. Book condition: VG-/None, with split cloth at joints, chips to spine ends, foxing to endpapers, and a catalog caption affixed to a front endpaper.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, stand among the most celebrated dialogues in the history of American politics. The debates focused on the issue of slavery, particularly on the hotly contested question of the expansion of the institution into newly acquired territories. Douglas promoted the solution of popular sovereignty—that is, allowing settlers of those territories to decide on the question—while Lincoln argued against the expansion of slavery, though he was not yet advocating for its abolition in whole. Although the incumbent Douglas was re-elected as senator by the Illinois General Assembly, the debates attracted widespread media attention and vaulted Lincoln into the forefront of national politics. This newfound publicity helped to lay the groundwork for Lincoln's successful 1860 presidential campaign.
The text of this edition was set in type from Lincoln's personal scrapbook, into which he had pasted transcripts of the debates as they were printed in local newspapers. It was published in April, a few months before Lincoln's nomination as the Republican candidate for president. The book rapidly became a bestseller; in a matter of months, over 30,000 copies were printed and sold.
