Stephen A. Douglas

Name	Stephen A. Douglas
Width	240px|
Office	United States Senatorfrom Illinois
State	Illinois|
Party	Democratic
Term start	March 4, 1847
Term end	June 3, 1861
Preceded	James Semple
Succeeded	Orville H. Browning
State2	Illinois
District2	5th
Term start2	March 4, 1843
Term end2	March 3, 1847
Preceded2	None
Succeeded2	William A. Richardson
Party election3	Northern Democratic
Nominee3	President of the United States
Spouse	Martha MartinAdele Cutts
Birth date	April 23, 1813
Birth place	Brandon, Vermont
Death date	June 03, 1861
Death place	Chicago, Illinois
Signature	Stephen A Douglas Signature.svg

Stephen Arnold Douglas (April 23, 1813 – June 3, 1861) was an American politician from the western state of Illinois, and was the Northern Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860. He lost to the Republican Party's candidate, Abraham Lincoln, whom he had defeated two years earlier in a Senate contest following a famed series of debates. He was nicknamed the "Little Giant" because he was short of stature but was considered by many a "giant" in politics. Douglas was well-known as a resourceful party leader, and an adroit, ready, skillful tactician in debate and passage of legislation. He was a leading proponent of democracy--and believed that the majority of citizens should decide, through the principle of Popular Sovereignty, contentious issues such as slavery and territorial expansion.

As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Douglas dominated the Senate in the 1850s. He was largely responsible for the Compromise of 1850 that apparently settled slavery issues. However, in 1854 he reopened the slavery question by the highly controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, that allowed the people of the new territories to decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery (which is known as "popular sovereignty"). The protest movement against this became the Republican Party.

Douglas supported the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, and denied that it was part of a Southern plot to introduce slavery in the Northern states; but also argued it could not be effective when the people of a territory declined to pass laws supporting it. When President James Buchanan and his Southern allies attempted to pass a Federal slave code, to support slavery even against the wishes of the people of Kansas, he battled and defeated this movement as undemocratic. This caused the split in the Democratic Party in 1860, as Douglas won the nomination but a breakaway southern faction nominated their own candidate, Vice President John C. Breckinridge. Douglas deeply believed in democracy, arguing the will of the people should always be decisive. When civil war came in April 1861, he rallied his supporters to the Union with all his energies, but he died a few weeks later.

Early life and education

He was born Arnold Douglass in Brandon, Vermont to Stephen Arnold Douglass and Sarah Fisk. Douglas dropped the second "s" from his name some years later.

He migrated to Illinois in 1833, where he served as an itinerant teacher, studied law, and settled in Jacksonville. By the end of the year, he wrote his Vermont relatives, "I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings principles and interests and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption."

Career

Douglas was appointed as Morgan County State's Attorney in 1834, serving until 1836. Within a decade, Douglas was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, and was appointed registrar of the Springfield Land Office, Illinois Secretary of State. He was appointed an associate justice of the Illinois 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 territorial expansion and supported the Mexican War. Elected by the legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1846, he was reelected in 1852 and 1858. He was challenged for his Senate position in 1858 by Abraham Lincoln, who had served with Douglas in the legislature. Their series of nationally famous debates significantly boosted Lincoln's reputation despite his loss to Douglas.

Douglas chiefly designed the Compromise of 1850; however, the support of Henry Clay was needed and he has received much of the credit. The omnibus bill containing the compromise did not pass Congress. Each point separately had majority support, but Northerners and Southerners combined to vote the bill down for their own reasons. Douglas passed the Compromise by dividing it into separate bills, and arranged a different majority for each.

Moving to Chicago, Douglas married wealth - a Mississippi woman who inherited a plantation worked by slave labor. An avid promoter of railroad expansion, he devised the land grant system to fund the Illinois Central railroad. He intended it to link the nation north and south, from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico; Douglas hoped that would more thoroughly integrate the regional economies and reduce section tensions. The railroad was funded, but the Civil War interrupted its construction. It did not reach the Gulf until afterward. Douglas owned land in Chicago which the railroad would make more valuable, but his primary motivation was political.

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 Democratic presidential nomination in 1852 and 1856.

While never a religious man, he was an eager promoter of Chicago. He donated 10 acres of his lakefront property, worth $50,000, to a small new Baptist college, the first University of Chicago. Critics said that he wanted to enhance the value of his adjoining lots.

Marriage and family

Douglas briefly courted Mary Todd (who married Abraham Lincoln instead). Douglas became a member of the Masonic fraternity in Springfield Lodge No. 4 in Springfield, Illinois in 1839. He was a member of several Masonic organizations in Springfield.

In March 1847 he married Martha Martin, the 21-year-old daughter of wealthy Colonel Robert Martin and his wife of North Carolina. The year after their marriage, her father died and bequeathed Martha a 2500-acre cotton plantation with 100 slaves on the Pearl River in Lawrence County, Mississippi. He appointed Douglas the property manager but, as a senator of the free state of Illinois, and with presidential aspirations, Douglas found the Southern plantation presented difficulties. He created distance by hiring a manager to operate the plantation, while using his allocated 20 percent of the income to advance his political career. His sole lengthy visit to Mississippi was in 1848, and he made only brief emergency trips thereafter.

The newlyweds moved their Illinois home from Springfield to fast-growing Chicago in the summer of 1847. They had two sons: Robert M. Douglas (January 1849-1892) and Stephen Arnold Douglas, Jr., (November 1850-d. ?). Martha Douglas died young on January 19, 1853, after the birth of her third child, a daughter. The girl died a few weeks later, and Douglas and the boys were bereft.

Douglas argued that the people of the territory should decide the slavery question by themselves, and that soil and climate made the territory unsuitable for plantations; which last reassured his northern supporters it would remain free. Douglas defended his doctrine of popular sovereignty as a means of promoting democracy and removing the slavery issue from national politics, lest it threaten to rip the nation apart, but it had exactly the opposite effect.

Douglas and Abraham Lincoln aired their disagreement on this topic in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854. Although Mr. Lincoln's three hour "Peoria Speech", presented thorough moral, legal and economic arguments against slavery, it did not stop the Act from passing.

The act was passed by Southern votes, Democratic and Whig alike, and Douglas had little to do with the final text. This was the first appearance of the Solid South, and the opponents of the Act saw it as the triumph of the hated Slave Power and formed the Republican Party to stop it.

Presidential aspirant

In 1852 and 1856, Douglas was a candidate for the Presidential nomination in the national Democratic convention; although he was unsuccessful, he received strong support on both occasions. 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. In 1857, Douglas broke with President James Buchanan and the "administration" Democrats, and lost much of his support in the Southern United States. He partially regained favor in the North – 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.

Debating Lincoln

In 1858, the United States Supreme Court – after the vote of Kansas against the Lecompton constitution – had decided that Kansas was a "slave" territory, thus quashing Douglas' theory of "popular sovereignty". In Illinois he engaged in a close contest for the Senate seat with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, whom he met in a series of seven debates which became known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In the second of the debates, Douglas said that any territory, by "unfriendly legislation", could exclude slavery, no matter what the action of the Supreme Court. Having already lost the support of much 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. .]] Before and during the debates, Douglas repeatedly invoked racist rhetoric, claiming Lincoln was for black equality. At Galesburg, he said that the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not intend to include blacks. "This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis . . . made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever," he said. Lincoln denied his opponent's assertion that the Declaration of Independence excluded blacks.

The debates were redefining republicanism. Lincoln advocated equality of opportunity, arguing that individuals and society advanced together. Douglas 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. Douglas won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54 to 46, but the debates helped boost Lincoln into the presidency.

Douglas competed with President Buchanan for control of the Democratic party. Although Douglas was not reappointed chairman of the Senate committee on territories, he bested Buchanan throughout the North and headed into 1860 as the front runner for president. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Douglas denounced secession as criminal; he 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 Midwest to rouse the spirit of Unionism; he spoke in Virginia, Ohio and Illinois.

Historical disputes

Position on slavery

For a century and a half, historians have debated whether Douglas opposed slavery, and whether he was a compromiser or a devotee of principles.

Douglas married into a slaveholding family (as did Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant), but the issue is whether he supported slavery as a matter of public policy. In his "Freeport Doctrine" of 1858, he repeatedly said that he did not care whether slavery was voted up or down, but only that the people had the right to vote it up or down. He denounced as sacrilegious the petitions signed by thousands of clergymen in 1854, who said the Nebraska Act offended God's will. He rejected the Republican notions that slavery was condemned by a "higher law" (Seward's position) or that the nation could not long survive as half slave and half free (Lincoln's position). He disagreed with the US Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision that Congress had no ability to regulate slavery in the territories. When Buchanan supported the Lecompton Constitution and the pro-slavery position on Kansas, Douglas fought him in a long battle that gained Douglas the 1860 Democratic nomination but ripped his party apart.

The historian Allan Nevins was harsh on Douglas, writing "When it [slavery] paid it was good, and when it did not pay it was bad." Nevins assessed that Douglas did not "regard a slaveholding society as one whit inferior to a free society." He criticized what he called Douglas's "dim moral perceptions."

Graham Peck finds that while several scholars have said that Douglas was personally opposed to slavery, none has presented "extensive arguments to justify the conclusion". He cites recent scholarship as (equally briefly) finding Douglas "insensitive to the moral repugnance of slavery" or even "proslavery". He concludes that Douglas was the "ideological [and] practical head of the northern opposition to the antislavery movement" and questions whether Douglas "opposed black slavery for any reason, including economics".

Harry Jaffa thought Douglas was tricking the South with popular sovereignty—telling Southerners it would protect slavery but believing the people would vote against it. Johannsen found Douglas "did not regard slavery as a moral question; at least, he never condemned the institution in moral terms either publicly or privately." However he "privately deplored slavery and was opposed to its expansion (and, indeed, in 1860 was widely regarded in both North and South as an antislavery candidate), he felt that its discussion as a moral question would place it on a dangerous level of abstraction."

1861 Lincoln Inauguration

Starting with Josiah Gilbert Holland's 1866 Life of Abraham Lincoln, a number of sources recount an anecdote in which Douglas holds Lincoln's hat at the president's first inaugural address. The story seems symbolic of both the power of the moment and the character of Douglas. He and Lincoln had been well-known rivals for both the senate and the presidency. Following the bitterly contested election of 1860, seven southern states seceded from the union. For decades, many scholars viewed the story with skepticism mainly due to its romantic appeal. In 1959, writing for American Heritage Magazine, the historian Nevins reported the discovery of two independent contemporary sources that corroborated the account.

Death

Douglas died in Chicago from typhoid fever on June 3, 1861. He was buried on the shore of Lake Michigan. After his death, Douglas's friends created the Douglas Monument Association. A prominent Sculptor by the name of Leonard W. Volk was commissioned to design the monument. The Memorial and tomb was completed in 1881.

Legacy and honors

Douglas' gravesite was bought by the state, which commissioned Leonard Volk for an imposing monument with a statue that was erected over his grave.

Douglas' birthplace in Brandon, Vermont has been memorialized as a Museum and Visitor Center.

Numerous places were named after him: counties in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin. Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, the cities of Douglas in Georgia and Wyoming were also named for him.

In popular culture

In 1957, the actor Walter Coy portrayed Douglas in the episode "Springfield Incident" of CBS's The 20th Century Fox Hour. Other stars of the segment are Lloyd Corrigan and Tom Tryon, and Alan Hale, Jr.

See also

Young America Movement

Notes

References

Robert W. Johannsen, ed. The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (1961)

Paul M. Angle, ed., Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (1958),

Lincoln, Abraham and Douglas, Stephen A. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text. Harold Holzer, Ed. Harpercollins, 1993.

Harry V. Jaffa and Robert W. Johannsen, eds. In the Name of the People: Speeches and Writings of Lincoln and Douglas in the Ohio Campaign of 1859. (1959) online version

Douglas, Stephen Arnold. A brief treatise upon constitutional and party questions, and the history of political parties, (1861) James Madison Cutts, ed. (1866)

Text supplemented from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Further reading

Barbee, David R., and Milledge L. Bonham, Jr. "The Montgomery Address of Stephen A. Douglas," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Nov., 1939), pp. 527–552 in JSTOR

Capers, Gerald M. Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union (1959), short biography

Clinton, Anita Watkins. "Stephen Arnold Douglas - His Mississippi Experience" Journal of Mississippi History 1988 50(2): 56-88.

Dean; Eric T., Jr. "Stephen A. Douglas and Popular Sovereignty" Historian 1995 57(4): 733-748 online version

Egerton, Douglas R., Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War, Bloomsbury Press, 2010. more on the book

Eyal, Yonatan. "With His Eyes Open: Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Disaster of 1854" Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 1998 91(4): 175-217. ISSN 1522-1067

Glickstein, Jonathan A., American exceptionalism, American anxiety: wages, competition, and degraded labor in the Antebellum United States; University of Virginia Press, (2002)

Hansen, Stephen and Nygard, Paul. "Stephen A. Douglas, the Know-nothings, and the Democratic Party in Illinois, 1854-1858" Illinois Historical Journal 1994 87(2): 109-130.

Huston, James L. "Democracy by Scripture versus Democracy by Process: A Reflection on Stephen A. Douglas and Popular Sovereignty." Civil War History. 43#1 (1997) pp: 189+. online version

Jaffa, Harry V. Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. 1959. online version

Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas (1973), 993pp the standard scholarly biography

Johannsen, Robert W. The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas U. of Illinois Press, 1989.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. Standard modern history of the war.

Milton, George Fort. The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (1934), older scholarly biography

Morris, Roy, Jr., The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Morrison, Michael A.Slavery and the American west: the eclipse of manifest destiny and the coming of the American Civil War University of North Carolina Press, (1997)

Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union especially vol 1-4 (1947–63): Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847-1852; A House Dividing, 1852-1857; Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857-1859; Prologue to Civil War, 1859-1861. highly detailed narrative of national politics with extensive coverage of Douglas

Nichols, Roy F. "The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (1956): 187-212; JSTOR

Peck, Graham A. "Was Stephen A. Douglas Antislavery?," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Summer 2005 online

Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1920) vol 1-2, detailed narrative

Russel, Robert R. "What Was the Compromise of 1850?" Journal of Southern History 20 (1956): 292-309 in JSTOR

Russel, Robert R. "The Issues in the Congressional Struggle Over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854," Journal of Southern History 29 (May 1963): 187-210; in JSTOR

Russel, Robert R. "The Issues in the Congressional Struggle Over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854," Journal of Southern History 29 (May 1963): 187-210; in JSTOR

Stevenson, James A. "Lincoln vs. Douglas over the Republican Ideal" American Studies 1994 35(1): 63-89

Zarefsky, David. Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: in the Crucible of Public Debate (1990). 309 pp

External links

Project Gutenberg text of Life of Stephen A. Douglas by William Gardner

Page images of two Speeches made by Douglas, one on the Compromise of 1850

Speech made before the NY State Agricultural Society

Association dedicated to preservation of Douglas history. Site contains many speeches and images.

Category:1813 births Category:1861 deaths Category:People from Rutland County, Vermont Category:Illinois Democrats Category:Democratic Party (United States) presidential nominees Category:United States Senators from Illinois Category:United States presidential candidates, 1852 Category:United States presidential candidates, 1856 Category:United States presidential candidates, 1860 Category:Union political leaders Category:Secretaries of State of Illinois Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:Bleeding Kansas Category:People from Jacksonville, Illinois Category:Infectious disease deaths in Illinois Category:Deaths from typhoid fever Category:Members of the Illinois House of Representatives Category:Members of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois Category:Illinois Supreme Court justices Category:Democratic Party United States Senators