Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln/Volume 4/Preface

by Abraham Lincoln, ed. Marion Mills Miller

PREFACE

The present volume begins with Lincoln's speeches in the Frémont campaign and ends with his opening address in the Fourth Joint Debate with Senator Douglas, at Charleston, Ill. Between these debates Mr. Lincoln delivered several speeches, fragments of which were jotted down by Mr. Horace White, now of the Evening Post of New York, and then reporter of the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Chicago Tribune. These are printed here in their chronological sequence, as is also the correspondence of the principals preliminary to the Debate.

With the exception of two legal arguments, all the speeches in the volume relate to the extension of slavery, the burning political issue of the time, which had been kindled by Senator Douglas's Nebraska Act, repealing the guaranty in the Missouri Compromise of free soil to the new territories north of the southern boundary of Missouri, and which had been fanned by the Dred Scott Decision into a flame endangering the freedom even of the States already established with a constitutional prohibition of slavery.