Lewis Lehrman begins his book with the daunting observation that the library of volumes about Abraham Lincoln is “vast”—larger, perhaps, than on any historical figure except Jesus. The acknowledgment implies a challenge: why should he write, and we read, one more Lincoln book? Can there be anything new, important, or even interesting left to say? Lehrman meets that challenge with a book that is argued, organized, and researched as deftly as it is titled. Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point asks what did Lincoln do at Peoria, and how was it a turning point?

Lehrman’s answers, briefly, are that on October 16, 1854 Lincoln gave a three-hour speech—more than sixty times as long as the Gettysburg Address—in front of Peoria’s courthouse in central Illinois. In it, he criticized the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had been signed by President Franklin Pierce five months earlier. Lincoln’s chief target, however, was Stephen Douglas, the dynamic Illinois senator who had drafted the bill and guided its difficult passage through Congress. In an arrangement that prefigured the famous debates between them four years later, Douglas spoke at the Peoria courthouse earlier that day, before listening to Lincoln’s speech, and then delivered a rebuttal. (The television remote control has, indeed, ravaged the human attention span.)

Lincoln’s Peoria speech was a turning point in several respects. Six years after serving a single congressional term, Lincoln revived his political career with a strong forensic performance against one of the