... And as American thinker.(Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point)(Book review)

Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point, by Lewis E. Lehrman (Stackpole, 412 pp., $29.95)

THE question of second acts in political leadership is one of the enduring riddles of history. Most would-be leaders simply fade into obscurity--remember Michael Dukakis--but a very few don't. Still, rarely is the path to eventual greatness easy or straightforward. For all his visions of glory, Winston Churchill was derided by his peers as a crank, an eccentric out of step with his party and ill-suited for the times; having led the American rebels to a stunning victory over the mother country, George Washington tendered his resignation and returned to Virginia, vowing never again to enter public life; and the unsophisticated Harry Truman was such an insignificant vice president that only upon FDR's death was Truman told by aides that America possessed the atom bomb.

And then, of course, there is the improbable story of Abraham Lincoln.

Improbable is the word. In 1849, his political fortunes were at their lowest ebb. He had had his run of bad luck: He was a failed one-term congressman, and Pres. Zachary Taylor wouldn't even appoint him commissioner of the General Land Office. His beloved Whig party was slowly falling apart. So, beset by disappointments and deep, debilitating moods, he returned to Illinois, mute and pensive, to practice law, unhappily watching events pass him by. But then came Congress's Kansas-Nebraska Act, authored by long-term Lincoln rival Stephen Douglas; it was this, as Lewis Lehrman vividly shows in his splendid new book, Lincoln at Peoria, that opened the door that led Lincoln back into public life.

For Lincoln, Kansas-Nebraska was a profound turning point in his own life as well as in the nation's history. By repealing the 34-year-old Missouri Compromise, the patchwork measure that had effectively divided North and South, it raised the dreadful specter of the spread of slavery everywhere. It was here, on the back of slavery, that Lincoln would reenter the political arena. And it was here, by some combination of design and fate, that Lincoln was destined to make his lasting mark.

Lincoln's seminal speech in Peoria on October 16, 1854, was actually one of a series of little-known Lincoln-Douglas debates, four years before the famous Senate-campaign debates that history more often recalls. With a painter's hand, Lehrman sets the stage: A crowd gathered and Douglas spoke first, carrying on for three hours, so long that he would later lose his voice; the famished throng then broke for dinner--this was at Lincoln's shrewd suggestion--and by the time Lincoln started at seven o'clock, it was already dark, the only light coming from the flicker of candles and lanterns flanking the square. In Lehrman's telling, the scene was perhaps a fitting metaphor for the national struggle to come. Equally fascinating, Lehrman persuasively argues that Lincoln's words at Peoria would foreshadow his oratorical masterpieces at his first and second inaugurals, as well as at Gettysburg, and lay the very foundation for his presidential decision-making.

In effect, Peoria represents Lincoln's coming of age. Gone are the sly quips and sarcasm, gone are the usual banalities in Whig thought about protective tariffs and internal ...