Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War

In early 1860, pundits across America confidently predicted the

election of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas in the coming

presidential race. Douglas, after all, led the only party that bridged

North and South. But the Democrats would split over the issue ofslavery,

leading Southerners in the party to run their own presidential slate.

This opened the door for the upstart Republicans, exclusively Northern,

to steal the Oval Office. Dark horse Abraham Lincoln, not the first

choice even of his own party, won the presidency with a record-low 39.8

percent of the popular vote.

Acclaimed scholar Douglas R. Egerton

chronicles the contest with a historian's keen insight and a veteran

political reporter's eye for detail. Vividly, Egerton re-creates the

cascade of unforeseen events that confounded political bosses, set North

and South on the road to disunion, and put not Stephen Douglas, but his

greatest rival, in the White House.

We see Lincoln and his team

outmaneuvering more prominent Republicans, like New York's grandiose

William Seward, while Democratic conventions collapse in confusion. And

we see the gifted, flawed Douglas marking his finest hour in defeat, as

he strives, and fails, to save the Union. Year of Meteors

delivers a teeming cast of characters, minor and major, and a breakneck

narrative of this most momentous year in American history.

A brilliantly told prequel to Team of Rivals-the first history

in six decades of the wild presidential contest that put Abraham

Lincoln in the White House and brought the United States to the brink of

civil war.