THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES – A DEMOCRAT SPEAKER’S COPY
[LINCOLN, Abraham, and Stephen DOUGLAS.]
Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the celebrated campaign of 1858, in Illinois … also, the two great speeches of Mr. Lincoln in Ohio, in 1859, as carefully prepared by the reporters of each party, and published at the times of their delivery.
Columbus, Follet, Foster, and Company, 1860.
8vo, pp. [4 (advertisements)], [4], 258; some scattered foxing, heavier in places, as always, but a very good copy; in the original blind-stamped pebbled cloth, a few stains to covers, spine chipped and worn at head and foot, short split at head of upper joint; ownership inscription of ‘M.C. Kerr, New Albany, Sept. 3d 1860’; pencil markings and loosely inserted scraps from periodicals to c. 5 pp. (see below).
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Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the celebrated campaign of 1858, in Illinois … also, the two great speeches of Mr. Lincoln in Ohio, in 1859, as carefully prepared by the reporters of each party, and published at the times of their delivery.
First edition, later issue, with a rule above the printer’s names on the copyright page and advertisements stating fifteen thousand copies sold, of the Lincoln–Douglas Senate campaign debates of 1858, ‘historically the most important series of American political debates’ (Howes), our copy owned by the first Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives after the Civil War.
The Lincoln–Douglas Senate campaign debates of 1858 cemented Lincoln as a future Presidential candidate, even though he lost the vote in 1858. The publication of the Debates was integral to the Presidential campaign of 1860 and they were reprinted many times throughout the year, here opening with Lincoln’s famous ‘House Divided’ speech of 16 June 1858 and including advertisements for a ‘great expose of the crimes against the slaves’, a forthcoming edition of Congressional speeches by Lincoln and Hamlin, and the anti-slavery novel Adela, the Octoroon.
Provenance:
The lawyer and politician Michael Crawford Kerr (1827–1876), of Indiana, was a member of the State Legislature from 1856–7, and later a Democrat member of the House of Representatives from 1865–73, becoming the first Democrat Speaker of the House after the Civil War in 1875, though he died in-post from tuberculosis in August 1876. A War Democrat like Douglas, Kerr opposed the Republicans’ lenient Reconstruction policies and was ‘regarded with unbridled admiration by Democrats and almost universal dread and hatred’ by many Republicans (Galveston Daily News, 20 August 1876, quoted in ANB). Kerr ‘championed hard money, favored lenient policies toward the South, and resisted expansion of federal powers. He also opposed adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment … his sympathy for the South and its racial policies enhanced his appeal to an incoming democratic majority that contained almost fifty veterans of the Confederacy’ (ANB).
Marginal pencil markings and inserted slips torn from contemporary periodicals bookmark passages of note on slavery and equality: among them are an 1860 clipping on the 36°30′ N parallel (the dividing line of the Missouri Compromise) listing free and slave states and territories and their respective populations, and underlined passages on the Dred Scott case and whether slavery should be permitted in new territories.
