The great lesson of the past is unpredictability. In 1850 no one, including Abraham Lincoln, imagined that he would be elected president ten years later. A lot of people, however, believed that Stephen A. Douglas was likely to land in the White House. Illinois newspapers had trumpeted that destination for him since his mid-twenties. In 1850 Douglas became a national star whose name appeared in nearly every other issue of northeastern newspapers. Lincoln made a splash during his one term in Congress by challenging President Polk’s justification for the Mexican War, but only one year after he left Washington, outside Illinois newspapers did not mention him even once. Before 1858 Douglas hardly had need to think about Lincoln at all, while Lincoln could not help reading about the “Little Giant” in whose shadow he had dwelled since the 1830s.

Until 1858 their rivalry was one-sided, with Douglas looming large in Lincoln’s mind. In 1854 Douglas’s Nebraska bill induced Lincoln to leave retirement and engage in active partisan opposition. In 1858 he won the Republican nomination for the Senate and stalked the Democratic incumbent until Douglas agreed to a series of debates that made Lincoln famous enough to seek the Republican presidential nomination two years later. The results of November 6, 1860, inverted the rivalry. For the first time Lincoln eclipsed Douglas.