Lincoln was elected to the presidency upon the issues and,
largely, upon the speeches of the 1858 campaign. Although the
secession crisis, as distinct from that concerning slavery in the
territories, dominated the period after 1858, there is no sharp
cleavage between the two. I have attempted to express herein
the full meaning only of Lincoln's debate with Douglas from 1854
to 1858, yet I have not hesitated to borrow occasionally from
Lincoln's 1859 and 1860 speeches when it was felt that such
borrowing clarified the meaning of what he had said earlier. No
endeavor has been made, however, to interpret with equal fullness
that final phase of the debate between Lincoln and Douglas which
merges into the election of 1860 and the secession crisis. This, I
feel, belongs properly to the treatment of the war years.

The crisis of the house divided was the spiritual crisis which
preceded secession and war. It is the thesis of this volume that,
had not Lincoln challenged Douglas in 1858, there would proba-
bly have been no subsequent crisis, or at least none of the same
nature. In 1858, by effectively destroying Douglas as the leader
of a national political coalition, by dividing him both from the
Republicans and from the South, Lincoln made morally certain
that the nation would be constitutionally committed to his view
of national political responsibility, a view which he well knew
most of the South believed incompatible with its dearest interests.
The crisis of the war years, with all its agony and possibility of
failure, was yet in a profound sense less critical than the moment
in which the commitment which produced it was being debated.
The two crises differed as the defense of something differs from
the decision to defend it. Or, to use the familiar metaphor which
dominated Lincoln's own vision of America's experience, they dif-
fered as the Passion differed from the Temptation in the
Wilderness. This study is meant to record, not without suggesting
something of its passion, Lincoln's conception of the intellectual
content of that moment of deliberation when the nation, as he
believed, was tempted to abandon its "ancient faith."

Since Lincoln's thought emerges, in considerable measure, in
dialectical fashion from the context of his continuing debate with
Douglas, it can be understood only in the light of the contrasting
policies and principles of his doughty antagonist. I have therefore
attempted to re-create as fully as possible the moral and political
horizon of the Little Giant. Douglas was a gallant as well as a

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