Stephen A. Douglas

Stephen Arnold Douglas
Stephen Arnold Douglas
U.S. Congressman from Illinois
	In office; 1843–1847
U.S. Senator from Illinois
	In office; 1847–1861
Personal details
Born	April 23, 1813; Brandon, Vermont
Died	June 3, 1861; Chicago, Illinois
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Martha Martin

Stephen Arnold Douglas (April 23, 1813 – June 3, 1861), known as the "Little Giant," he was an American politician from the frontier state of Illinois, and was the Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860. He lost to Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln, also from Illinois. He was one of the most important leaders in Congress in the 1850s, and helped shape the Third Party System; he authored the highly controversial Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 that reopened the slavery question.

Early Career

Born in Vermont he came to Illinois in 1833 as a young men, was an itinerant teacher, studied law, and settled in Jacksonville. After brief terms as state's attorney, legislator, and secretary of state he became a member of the state supreme court in 1841, at age 27. A leader of the majority Democratic party He was elected twice to Congress (1842 and 1844), where he championed expansion and supported the Mexican War. Elected by the legislature to the Senate in 1847, he was reelected in 1853 and 1859. He contested the 1858 legislative elections by going head to head with Lincoln in a series of nationally famous debates. He was the main promoter of the Compromise of 1850; although Henry Clay usually gets more credit, it was Douglas who managed to pass the necessary bills using his remarkable skills as a legislator. He moved to Chicago, gaining wealth by marriage to a Mississippi woman who inherited a slave plantation. An avid promoter of westward expansion, he devised the land grant system that enabled the funding of the Illinois Central railroad.

Douglas always had a deep and abiding faith in democracy. "Let the people rule!" was his cry, and he insisted that the people locally could and should make the decisions about slavery, rather than the national government. He was passed over for the presidential nomination in 1852 and 1856.

Kansas-Nebraska 1854

Douglas is most famous for proposing the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. He developed the doctrine of popular sovereignty as a means of removing the slavery issue from national politics, where it threatened to rip the nation apart. Constructed as an alternative to the more extreme solutions of direct federal control or blanket protection of slavery, the doctrine left the decision to the inhabitants of the territories. Douglas' support of the bill was based on his commitment to the principle of sovereignty and local self-government. He believed in the ability of individuals to regulate their own affairs, a clear reflection of his adherence to the idea of Manifest Destiny and US expansionist policies. Essentially, he was betting that the good consequences would outweigh the bad and that the nation would withstand the collateral antagonisms, a position proven incorrect by events leading up to the Civil War. Opponents saw it as the triumph of the hated Slave Power and formed the Republican Party to stop him. He passed the act, but Illinois went Republican for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, whereas Douglas won just Missouri and New Jersey.

Presidential aspirant

In 1852, and again in 1856, Douglas was a candidate for the presidential nomination in the national Democratic convention, and though on both occasions he was unsuccessful, he received strong support. When the Know Nothing movement grew strong he crusaded against it, but hoped it would split the opposition. In 1858 he won significant support in many former Know-Nothing strongholds. [Hansen and Nygard] In 1857, he broke with President Buchanan and the "administration" Democrats and lost much of his support in the Southern United States, but partially restored himself to favor in the North, and especially in Illinois, by his vigorous opposition to the method of voting on the Lecompton constitution, which he saw as fraudulent, and (in 1858) to the admission of Kansas into the Union under this constitution.

In 1858, when the Supreme Court, after the vote of Kansas against the Lecompton constitution, had decided that Kansas was a "slave" territory, thus quashing Douglas’s theory of "popular sovereignty", he engaged in Illinois in a close and very exciting contest for the senate seat with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, whom he met in a series of seven famous debates which became known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In the second of the debates, Douglas was led to declare that any territory, by "unfriendly legislation", could exclude slavery, no matter what the action of the Supreme Court. Having already lost the support of a large element of his party in the South, his association with this famous Freeport Doctrine made it anathema to many southerners, including Jefferson Davis, who would have otherwise supported it. Much of the debate was about the redefinition of republicanism. Lincoln advocated equality of opportunity, arguing that individuals and society advanced together. Douglas, on the other hand, embraced a democratic doctrine that emphasized equality of all citizens (only whites were citizens), in which individual merit and social mobility was not a main goal. [Stevenson 1994] Douglas, however, won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54 to 46, but the debates helped boost Lincoln into the presidency. In the Senate Douglas was not reappointed chairman of the committee on territories.

In 1860 in the Democratic national convention in Charleston the failure to adopt a slave code to the territories in the platform brought about the withdrawal from the convention of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Arkansas. The convention adjourned to Baltimore, where the Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Maryland delegations left it, and where Douglas was nominated for the presidency by the Northern Democrats. He campaigned vigorously but hopelessly, boldly attacking disunion, and in the election, though he received a popular vote of 1,376,957 (2nd at 29%) he received an electoral vote of only 12 (4th and last at 4%) - Lincoln receiving 180 (see: U.S. presidential election, 1860).

Later career and legacy

Douglas urged the South to acquiesce to Lincoln's election. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, he denounced secession as criminal, and was one of the strongest advocates of maintaining the integrity of the Union at all hazards. At Lincoln's request he undertook a mission to the border states and to the North-west to rouse the spirit of Unionism; he spoke in West Virginia (then still a part of Virginia), Ohio and Illinois.

Douglas died from typhoid fever on June 3, 1861 in Chicago, where he was buried on the shore of Lake Michigan; the site was afterwards bought by the state, and an imposing monument with a statue by Leonard Volk now stands over his grave.

Personal and family

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In person Douglas was conspicuously small, standing somewhere from 4'6" (137 cm) to 5'4" (163 cm) in height, but his large head and massive chest and shoulders gave him the popular sobriquet "The Little Giant". Though his voice was strong and carried far, he had little grace of delivery, and his gestures were often violent. As a resourceful political leader, and an adroit, ready, skillful tactician in debate, he has had few equals in American history.

Douglas moved to a farm near Clifton Springs, N.Y. and entered Canandaigua Academy in 1832 and studied law there.

Douglas's marriage in March of 1847 to Martha Martin, daughter of Colonel Robert Martin of North Carolina, brought with it the new responsibility of a large cotton plantation in Lawrence County, Mississippi worked by slaves. To Douglas, an Illinois senator with presidential aspirations, the management of a Southern plantation with slave labor presented a difficult situation. However, Douglas sought to escape slaveholding charges by employing James S. Stricklin as agent and manager for his Mississippi holdings, while using the economic benefits derived from the property to advance his political career. His sole lengthy visit to Mississippi came in 1848, with only brief emergency trips thereafter. [Clinton 1988] The newlyweds moved their Illinois home to fast-growing Chicago in the summer of 1847. Martha Douglas died January 19, 1853, leaving the Senator with two small sons (one of whom was Robert M. Douglas). On November 20, 1856, he married 20 year-old Adele Cutts, the daughter of James Madison Cutts of the District of Columbia, and a great-niece of Dolley Madison. [] Error: {{Lang}}: no text (help)

Douglas Counties in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, South Dakota and Nevada are named after him; as is Douglas, Georgia.

External links

Template:Succession footnote

Preceded by James Semple	U.S. senator (Class 2) from Illinois 1847 – 1861 Served alongside: Sidney Breese, James Shields, Lyman Trumbull	Succeeded by Orville H. Browning
Preceded by James Buchanan	Democratic Party Presidential candidate^[1] 1860 (lost)	Succeeded by George McClellan

^ The Democratic party split in 1860, producing two presidential nominees. Douglas was nominated by Northern Democrats; John C. Breckinridge was nominated by Southern Democrats.

[1] The Democratic party split in 1860, producing two presidential nominees. Douglas was nominated by Northern Democrats; John C. Breckinridge was nominated by Southern Democrats.

[1]