Stephen A.Douglas was a risk-taker by temperament; I expect that Lincoln - Douglas debates represented another risk he just couldn't resist. He lived to regret it.

I don't know that there has ever been a time when Abraham Lincoln didn't stand head-and-shoulders above all other presidents in the historians' eye. But relatively speaking, there have been peaks and a troughs. One peak was in the 1910s-20s; a major trough was in the 1970s-80s. We are certainly on a peak again, something which began in 1994 with Michael Burlingame's 'The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,' which showed in fabulous detail how many new and untapped sources were available on Lincoln.

The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.

What Abraham Lincoln had to face was a culturally and politically cohesive bloc of states comprising half the country, refusing to discuss even the limitation of slavery; while he had only the most feeble means of enforcement. The British and the French could do their emancipating at a distance; Lincoln had armed resistance almost literally at his doorstep.

Corporations did not achieve the scale we normally associate with them until the 1880s; but it's still hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln would offered much in the way of determined opposition. William Herndon said that they always thanked the Lord when a corporation came knocking at their office door to hire them.

The one who pursues revenge should dig two graves.

One thing which Stephen A. Douglas was temperamentally incapable of doing was admitting he was wrong. He always believed that 'popular sovereignty' - the core doctrine of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill - was the right solution to the slavery controversy; and even though it had failed to solve much of anything in Kansas and Nebraska, he stubbornly insisted that this was because it had never been adequately tested.