Reviewing for "The Independent Review", a think tank associated with DiLorenzo, Richard M. Gamble called the book a "travesty of historical method and documentation". He said the book was plagued by a "labyrinth of and grammatical errors", and concluded that DiLorenzo has "earned the ... ridicule of his critics." In his review for the Claremont Institute, Ken Masugi writes that "DiLorenzo adopts as his own the fundamental mistake of leftist multi-culturalist historians: confusing the issue of race with the much more fundamental one, which was slavery." He noted that in Illinois "the anti-slavery forces actually joined with racists to keep their state free of slavery, and also free of blacks." Masugi called DiLorenzo's work "shabby" and stated that DiLorenzo's treatment of Lincoln was "feckless" and that the book is "truly awful". In 2002, DiLorenzo debated Claremont Institute fellow professor Harry V. Jaffa on the merits of Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship before and during the Civil War.