Let’s talk a bit about the debate texts.  At the time of the debates there was no television, radio, or recording available.  So how did the country learn about these debates?  There was such an interest in these debates that Chicago newspapers had them fully transcribed by stenographers on the spot.  These transcriptions would be reprinted in the newspapers a few days later.  Then the national press would reprint them for people in other states.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Remember when Rhonda talked about Lincoln’s scrapbook?  You can scroll down and find it if you haven’t read it already.  Or if you don’t remember… it’s okay, I forget so much I’m convinced my memory has a leak.  Okay, remember that Lincoln kept records from different papers and wrote in the margins?  Why did he do that?  That’s right, because newspapers back then favored one candidate over the other.  So it is safe to say that papers that favored Douglas edited his debate speech a bit, and vice versa with the Republican papers.  So, the reprinted debates were not totally accurate reporting.

How can we find the accurate accounts?  A few ways: eyewitness accounts, small town press reports, and the stenographers from the major press.  Now it is true that the major press polished the debate of “their” candidate, but they left the other candidate’s speech alone.  So, if you follow the Lincoln text from the Democrat papers and the Douglas text from the Republican papers, you will get a fair representation of the debates.  Historian Harold Holzer has compiled these transcripts in the book The Lincoln Douglas Debates: The First Unexpurgated Text.