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Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition
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Preface to the Fordham University Press Edition TEN YEARS AGO, the initial appearance of this book unexpectedly set off a small firestorm in the Lincoln scholarly community. Of course, it was nothing like the mammoth explosion of interest that greeted the original Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in 1858, the debates not only riveted the eyewitnesses who packed town squares and fairgrounds to hear them in Illinois, but also captured the attention of readers around the country who devoured every word in newspaper reprints. Those very newspaper reprints had provided the inspiration for the 1993 book-as much for what they did not contain as what they did. In the age of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A Douglas, Republicans read Republican-affiliated newspapers, which featured debate transcripts recorded by Republican-hired stenographers -who spent far more time polishing Lincoln's words than Douglas's. Democrats, similarly, read pro-Democratic journals that offered well-prepared versions of the Democratic candidate's xii • PREFACE TO THE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS EDITION • speeches, and but the roughest versions of his opponent's. The purpose of my book was to rescue the long-ignored, and likely unimproved "reverse" transcriptions of the debates-those which each party hireling had made of the opposition speaker-and therefore try to come as close as possible to the unedited and immediate truth of the most famous debates in American history. The debates had been republished many times since 1858. But following Lincoln's lead in preparing for their initial appearance in book form in 1860, they had always featured Republican-sanctioned transcripts of Lincoln's remarks, and Democratic versions of Douglas's. Never before had anyone bothered to consult, much less publish, the "opposition" transcripts: the Republican-commissioned stenographic records of Democrat Douglas's speeches and rebuttals, and in turn, the Democratic Party-commissioned transcriptions of what Republican Lincoln said. Instead, for more than a century, readers had come to rely on-and unquestionably accept -the suspiciously well-parsed "official" transcriptions, undoubtedly edited further by the party press before their final publication, in an era in which newspapers were unashamedly allied with, and biased toward, one political party or another.1 So much so, in fact, that Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper warned, two years before the Lincoln-Douglas debates got underway , that partisanship among the major publications sometimes exceeded that of their own readers. "The bitterness of partizanship ," LeslieJs declared in 1856, "and the indulgences of sectional feelings are more rife, in newspapers ... than in the feelings of the voters." Considering that such an atmosphere prevailed in 1858, I always wondered why historians had trusted the sanitized, partymade debate records for so long.2 Historian Douglas L. Wilson in one sense agreed, commenting about my original 1993 book: "In making these opposition texts available, Holzer . . . performed a rare feat in Lincoln studies: bringing to light for the first time documents of great interest and importance that shed real light on the Lincoln-Douglas debates." But Wilson was troubled by what he called my "glaringly circular 1 Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 163. The authors note that "urgent partisan rhetoric" was "a staple of the political press. 2 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, July 12, 1856. [3.89.163.156] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:22 GMT) o PREFACE TO THE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS EDITION o xiii argument" for their truthfulness, contending that the result put modern readers "in the awkward position of trusting extremely partisan newspapers without strong and compelling reasons for doing so."3 But this was precisely the point for publishing the reverse transcripts -and remains the argument for reissuing this book a decade later: We had too long trusted the accepted texts and transcriptions. This book never intended to provide an unquestionable replacement text of the Lincoln-Douglas debates but, rather, an important alternative record that should be available to the public and judged for its veracity, as are the stenographic reports taken down by supporters of each debater. Professor Wilson, who published a long "review essay" about the book in an important Lincoln journal, and later republished it in a book/ did acknowledge, too, that the long-accepted texts should come under closer scrutiny. As he noted, the general editor of the fifty-year-old, terribly outdated Collected Works qfAbraham Lincoln, had been under too much "pressure" to question, or vary from, the official record that Lincoln...