Lincoln at Peoria
The Turning Point

by Lewis E. Lehrman

Christopher Levenick - Writer for The Wall Street Journal

“Lincoln's return to politics, and the speeches it occasioned, is the subject of Lewis E. Lehrman's "Lincoln at Peoria." Intimately familiar with the primary sources and armed with a sweeping command of the historiography, Mr. Lehrman convincingly argues that Peoria marks the inflection-point in Lincoln's political development, when he discovered both the essence of the cause he embraced and the most persuasive way to convey it. At Peoria, Lincoln ceased to be an unremarkable Whig politician, concerned with the usual party platforms on internal improvements and protective tariffs. He gave evidence for the first time of his scrupulous study of the American founding. That fall day was, Mr. Lehrman suggests, the moment when Lincoln became Lincoln.”

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Publisher's Weekly

“In this careful, balanced look at Abraham Lincoln’s stirring 1854 Peoria, Ill., speech, writer and historian Lehrman finds a “prelude to greatness” that put the little known lawyer and politician on the path to national prominence while laying the intellectual groundwork for his presidency. The subject was slavery, already the great question of 19th century America, recently reignited with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed earlier anti slavery laws for certain new territories. Arguing that the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence extended to African-Americans, Lincoln took an abolitionist position daring for any politician with national ambitions (though he did not go so far as to advocate for full social or political equality). Lehrman also considers Lincoln’s Illinois nemesis, Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, sponsor of the new Kansas Nebraska Act who spoke at Peoria before Lincoln as a stalwart booster of “the rights of whites to enslave blacks.” Ably building on the drama of Lincoln’s anti-slavery efforts through subsequent years, culminating in his ascent to the presidency, Lehrman’s detailed chronicle, rich in first-person accounts, lays out the case that from his earliest public forays, Lincoln was no ordinary leader.”

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