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Stamped with the author's hallmarks of assured scholarship, acute analysis, and vivid writing, Lincoln and Douglas makes its major contribution to historical understanding by placing the familiar seven joint debates within the commonly neglected and much broader election campaign. Guelzo graphically describes the atmosphere of the contest, its blood and muscle, its function as popular entertainment, and its effect on the protagonists. As Lincoln grew in self-confidence, confounding expectations that he would be embarrassingly out-gunned, so Douglas became increasingly ill-tempered, and his recourse to alcoholic relief only helped slur his swollen-tongued responses to "Misha Linka."  Lincoln, alert to the combined power of the stenographers, the telegraph, and the newspaper press, saw the advantage in developing his arguments and altering his focus as the campaign advanced; Douglas did not.

More profoundly, Guelzo shows how over the course of the protracted campaign both speakers pursued a strategy in conjunction with their state committees. Neither protagonist was keen on the idea of joint debates (which were barely debates at all but, rather, sequential speeches). Douglas felt he had more to lose in head-to-head encounters, and Lincoln only reluctantly agreed to them, fearing that his opponent would use his "imperious and emphatic style of oratory" to rouse crowds packed with idolizing supporters. But the candidates and their managers were of one mind that success would lie, above all, in personally addressing as many voters as possible in the swing counties of central Illinois. Breaking the campaign down into five distinct phases, Guelzo shows how, even when the joint debates were held at one or other extremity of the state (Ottawa and Freeport in the pro-Republican north; Jonesboro in the Democrat-strong south), the candidates spent most of their time crisscrossing the central heartlands to attract the conservative Whig and American party voters on whom the outcome would depend.

Guelzo's approach yields rich rewards, not least in showing how Lincoln's commonly cited remarks at Charleston, brutally explicit in their readiness to keep blacks in their inferior social and political position, were a response not only to Douglas' increasingly effective recourse to racial demagoguery but also to the urgent pleas of Lincoln's local Republican advisors desperate to stop old Whigs shifting to Douglas because he was "sound on niggers." Lincoln's words at Charleston were indeed, in Guelzo's judicious characterization, an ugly pandering to racial animosities, but it was manifestly an uncomfortable statement, and thoughtfully calculated in what it did not say. It denied blacks their claim to civil rights but did nothing to assert a natural inferiority or to question the natural rights which he unyieldingly believed were due to blacks as part of their common humanity with whites—and which, as encoded in the Declaration of Independence, were God-given and inalienable.

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