Louis W. Koenig’s recent article that championed William Jennings Bryan as the first, full-fledged presidential campaigner in 1896 (“The First Hurrah,” April/May, 1980) brought us a good deal of mail. Two readers, Jerome Harman of Rogers, Arizona, and Professor Don E. Fehrenbacher, each argued that the first true campaigner was not Bryan but Stephen A. Douglas. Fehrenbacher, a member of our advisory board and winner of the 1979 Pulitzer prize for his monumental study The Dred Scott Case , writes that while “it is true that ever since 1896, campaigning by the presidential candidates themselves has been expected and normal, Koenig badly overstates his case when he calls Bryan the ‘inventor of this uniquely American madness,’ and he is simply flat out wrong when he declares: ’… until a time within the living memory of many Americans, the candidate himself never even considered appearing.’ Koenig, even though he mentions the campaign of 1860 and Lincoln’s abstention from speechmaking, fails to say anything about Stephen A. Douglas, the real inventor of presidential campaigning if there was one. Robert W. Johannsen devotes about twenty-five pages to the story in his biography of Douglas. Physically, it was an effort as heroic as anything Bryan ever did, made in an age of more primitive transportation. The trail led to Boston, Albany, Burlington, Montpelier, Concord, Providence, Norfolk, Petersburg, Raleigh, Richmond, Baltimore, Harrisburg, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago, Iowa City, Dubuque, Memphis, Huntsville, Nashville, Atlanta, Macon, Montgomery, and Mobile—and I have left out many other places where he spoke. It was a campaign for the Presidency that in its final stages became a plea for the Union. Douglas finished the ordeal with his voice reduced to a whisper and walking with a crutch. He probably never fully recovered from the exhaustion that he suffered but ignored. It is a story that ought not to be forgotten, as Koenig seems to have done.”

Professor Koenig, author of The Invisible Presidency and Bryan , responds: “In my initial draft, I had material on various precursors of Bryan, including Stephen A. Douglas, Horace Greeley, James G. Blaine, and James B. Weaver. Because of space limitations, I had to cut drastically, and only Blaine remains in my final draft.

“On the question of who invented presidential campaigning as it is known in modern times, I believe that several standards are applicable, above and beyond Douglas’ achievement of touring through several parts of the country.

“1. For the active presidential campaign to become established, the sentiment that it was offensive to the dignity of the Presidency had to be combatted, and a new norm formulated accepting and approving of the active campaign. Douglas did not provide this formulation.

“Although Douglas made several trips, he carefully and publicly justified them as being unrelated to the campaign. In other words, he made no effort to justify the active campaign as a pursuit