“The prairies are on fire,” reported a New York newspaper in 1858, gazing west to take the temperature of the most heated election contest in the nation.¹

In the summer of that turbulent year, as America slid perilously closer to the brink of disunion, two Illinois politicians seized center stage and held the national spotlight for two extraordinary months. Through the sheer force of their words, personalities, and ideas—not to mention the exuberance of their supporters—they transformed a statewide contest for the U.S. Senate into a watershed national disquisition on the contentious issue of slavery. They attracted tens...

The texts published here for the first time since 1858 are the unedited transcripts recorded on the spot during each Lincoln-Douglas debate by theoppositionpress. Previous anthologies presented only the much improved, suspiciously seamless versions supposedly recorded simultaneously by each debater's friendly newspaper.

The resurrection of these unexpurgated transcripts will give modern readers long-overdue access to the debates as they were likely heard originally by the multitudes who witnessed the encounters back in 1858. In the process, the historical record will finally be liberated from reliance on texts that long ago were processed through the alembic of hired reporters,...

The first Lincoln-Douglas debate began late. No one was prepared for the crush of humanity that poured into the overwhelmingly Republican village of Ottawa on that searingly hot day, and no one made adequate provisions to control the crowd. The result bordered on chaos, and Lincoln later confided of the “vast concourse of people” that there were “more than could [get] near enough to hear.”

A canal town hugging the Fox and Illinois rivers midway between Chicago and Peoria in the northern part of the state, Ottawa could claim a permanent population of at most 7,000. But by debate day,...

Stephen A. Douglas arrived in Freeport the night before the second great debate to be greeted by “a vast multitude,” “a turn-out of torches,” and “a salvo of artillery” as enthusiastic as any welcome ever afforded “Napoleon or Victoria.” At least, that is how the Democratic press described the reception afforded him there. As a Republican journal scoffed, the so-called parade attracted only “boys” and “loafers,” and boasted no more than seventy-four torches at most.

If the latter version came closer to the truth, there was ample reason. The site of the second Lincoln-Douglas meeting, like the first, was a...

They called the region Egypt—perhaps because the throat of land here that jutted into the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers looked so much like the Nile Delta; possibly because its old Indian mounds resembled pyramids; or maybe only because its best-known town was named Cairo. No one knows for sure. What was indisputable, however, was that this was anything but Lincoln country—a bastion of pro-slavery, negrophobic sentiment nestled in rural isolation between two slave states, Kentucky and Missouri. Chicago was a distant 300 miles away, but the South was just across the river. And as historian...

For Abraham Lincoln, the fourth debate at Charleston was in many ways a homecoming. Thirty years earlier, as a nineteen-year-old pioneer boy, he had migrated to this region with his family, negotiating a huge oxcart brimming with their crude belongings. Here his aged stepmother still lived in a primitive cabin not many miles from town. Following the debate, Lincoln would spend a night in the home of his first cousin’s son-in-law, no doubt enjoying a nostalgic reunion with relatives and old friends.

A further reminder of Lincoln’s intimate association with the agricultural, onetime pro-Whig Coles County in east central Illinois...

The “immense” audience that massed on the campus of Knox College in Galesburg for the fifth Lincoln-Douglas meeting was by some accounts the largest of the debates. It might have been even larger had not the perils of nineteenth-century rail travel conspired with the extremes of autumn prairie weather to inhibit attendance.

A twenty-two-car special train from Peoria, overflowing with 2,000 Galesburg-bound passengers, ran into mechanical problems that day, failing to arrive until the debate was nearly over. And after a day of downpours on October 6, the seventh dawned raw and cold. A strong sun failed to melt the...

Located at the far western edge of central Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from the state of Missouri, Quincy was moderate in political sentiment, with a slight edge in support for the Democrats. In short, it was typical of the regions in which both candidates needed to broaden their appeal in order to win the election. Perhaps for just this reason, the debate here degenerated into one of the nastiest of the campaign. “It is certainly to be regretted,” a journalist complained afterwards, “that the canvass in Illinois has turned so much on personal issues.”

By midday, boats filled...

In terms of pure drama, the Lincoln-Douglas encounter at Alton paled before the memory of the violent confrontation that had made the river village infamous twenty-one years before. Back in 1837, abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered here by a violent pro-slavery mob while trying to protect his printing press from destruction. The final debate of the 1858 Senate campaign seemed tame by comparison.

Because of Alton’s ugly history, however, and because the debate there was the very last meeting between the candidates, the debate at the Mississippi River town in southwestern Illinois was expected to attract a considerable...