User:JPFay

The Bryant Cottage
Located	Bement, Illinois
Address	146 E. Wilson Ave.
Constructed	1856

I really don't check my discussion page very regularly so probably the most expedient was to contact me is through .

The Bryant Cottage State Historic Site is a simple, 1856 four-room house located in Bement, Illinois in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is preserved by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency as an example of Piatt County, Illinois pioneer architecture and as a key historic site in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Part of the sequence of events that led up to those debates was a meeting of the two men as guests on the evening of July 29 at the Bryant Cottage. Bement had no newspaper at the time, and so it was there that these guests were treated with a respect and discretion that was totally lacking in the harsh, highly partisan news reports of their other meetings.

The meeting of Lincoln and Douglas is soundly documented and without any reasoned, factual refutation. That history has been endorsed by Lincoln scholars, the New York Times, Voice of America, the BBC, and Arnold Toynbee.

One book on the history of the debates says the meeting in Bement was merely the first step in the culmination of a much longer debate about slavery in the U.S.: "When Lincoln and Douglas met at Bement to arrange their joint canvasses, they had already been engaged in political debate for nearly twenty years." Indeed, the author says, "The road to Bement stretched back in time—all the way, perhaps, to the founding of the country…"

This compares with the treatment often the meeting in general interest works. In those works the meeting is often little more than an object of bucolic buffoonery. Moreover, over the years this history has become incorporated into and become secondary to a significant body of spurious hyperbole featuring people and places with no association with the Cottage or the village of Bement. These entertaining, but highly spurious, "histories" relegating the history of the Bryant Cottage to "rumor" or "folklore" are totally at odds with the undisputed contemporaneous press accounts of the day. As such, the story of the Bryant Cottage is a sobering case study in historiography.

The events leading up to the meeting are extensively documented in archives as early as 1860, but especially in histories such as those of Edwin Sparks and Roy P. Basler.

Lincoln challenged Douglas to the debates in a letter dated July 24, and Douglas responded with a letter brimming with complaints and problems that precluded the debates but said he would confer with Lincoln "at the earliest convenient opportunity in regard to the mode of conducting the debate and the times of meeting at the several places"

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Wikipedia