Stephen A. Douglas

American politician

• Born: April 23, 1813
• Birthplace: Brandon, Vermont
• Died: June 3, 1861
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Best remembered for the political debates he waged with Abraham Lincoln, Douglas was endowed with a vision of nationalism and worked to develop the United States internally and to preserve the Union on the eve of the Civil War.

Early Life

Stephen A. Douglas spent his early life in Vermont and western New York State. When he was only two months old, his father died, and he lived on a farm with his widowed mother until he was fifteen. At that point, he set off for Middlebury, Vermont, to see “what I could do for myself in the wide world among strangers.” He apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker, but a dispute developed and he returned home after eight months. His mother remarried in late 1830 and moved with her new husband to his home in western New York near Canandaigua, and Douglas accompanied them.

Douglas’s early schooling in Vermont had been of the sketchy common-school variety, but in New York he entered the Canandaigua Academy, where he boarded and studied. There, he began to read law as well as study the classics, until he left school on January 1, 1833, to devote himself to full-time legal study. Early interested in politics, and particularly that of Andrew Jackson, Douglas associated himself for six months with the law office of Walter and Levi Hubbell, prominent local Jacksonians. New York State requirements for admission to the bar being very stringent—four years of classical studies and three of legal—Douglas decided to move. He was a young man in a hurry, and in June, 1833 (at twenty years of age), he moved west to seek his fortune.

Douglas went first to Cleveland, Ohio, before finally settling further west in Illinois. Douglas taught school briefly in Winchester, Illinois, and then decided to apply for his law certificate. Requirements for admission to the bar were far easier to satisfy on the frontier than they were in the settled East, and in March, 1834, Douglas was examined by Illinois Supreme Court justice Samuel D. Lockwood and received his license to practice. At the age of twenty-one, he had a vocation as a licensed attorney and could pursue his real love, which was politics. Douglas was not physically imposing, standing only five feet, four inches, with a head too large for his body, but he possessed tremendous energy. He would later receive such nicknames as the “Little Giant” and “a steam engine in britches.”

Douglas’s climb up the political ladder was meteoric. In 1835, he was elected state’s attorney for the Morgan (Illinois) Circuit, and his political career was launched. He held a series of elective and appointive offices at the state level and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 1843, at the age of thirty. He held that position until he resigned in 1847, having been elected to the U.S. Senate, a post he held until his death in 1861 at the age of forty-eight.

Life’s Work

Douglas’s life work was clearly political in nature. He had a vision of the United States as a great nation, and he wanted to use the political system to make his dream of “an ocean bound republic” a reality. He was willing to do whatever was necessary to develop and expand the United States and to preserve what was sacred to him, the Union. He expended enormous amounts of energy on his dream of developing the West by working to organize the Western territories and by urging the construction of a transcontinental railroad to bind the nation together.

Two of the highlights of Douglas’s career in the Senate involved the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. There is a certain irony in the fact that the former was thought to have saved the Union while the latter destroyed it. Upon the acquisition of a vast amount of territory in the Mexican War, the nation was on the verge of disunion in 1849-1850 over the question of whether slavery should be allowed to expand into the area of the Mexican concession.

It was Douglas, taking over from an ailing Henry Clay, who put together the package that has come to be called the Compromise of 1850. That compromise, which required months of intense political maneuvering, included such items as California’s entry into the Union as a free state, the organization of New Mexico and Utah as territories without restriction on slavery, a stronger fugitive slave law, the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and the settlement of the Texas Bond issue. That this legislation was passed is a testimony to Douglas’s ability to put together what appeared to be impossible voting coalitions.

With that compromise widely acclaimed as the “final settlement” of the nation’s problems, Douglas sought but failed to get the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1852. It went instead to Franklin Pierce, who defeated General Winfield Scott in the general election and who is regarded in retrospect as one of the weakest American presidents. Pierce, fearing Douglas’s unconcealed political ambitions, excluded him from the inner circle of presidential power, and that exclusion compounded the great despair into which Douglas was plunged following the death of his first wife in January, 1853. His wife was the former Martha Martin of North Carolina, and her short life ended from the complications of childbirth. In an effort to overcome his grief, Douglas left the United States for a tour of Europe in the spring of 1853, and when he returned for the opening of the Thirty-third Congress that fall, he was out of touch with political developments in this country.

In the preceding session of Congress, Douglas’s Senate Committee on Territories had reported a bill to organize Nebraska Territory with no mention of slavery. By the time he returned from Europe, the political dynamics had changed, and the pressure mounted to organize two territories and to include a section dealing directly with the slavery question. Kansas-Nebraska lay wholly within the area acquired by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, where slavery had been forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Convinced that it was crucial to the national interest to get these territories organized as quickly as possible, and firmly believing that the slavery question was a phony issue, Douglas rewrote his organization bill. The new version called for two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and included a sentence that stated that the 36 degrees, 30 minutes section of the Missouri Compromise was inoperative as it had been “superseded by the principles of the legislation” passed in 1850, which had made no reference to slavery. Such a statement was consistent with Douglas’s long-standing belief in popular sovereignty, the idea that the people of a given territory should determine for themselves the institutions they would establish.

When the bill passed after months of the most hostile infighting in the U.S. Congress, and the president signed it into law in May, 1854, a storm of protest swept over the United States the likes of which had not been seen before and has not been seen since. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill split the Democratic Party and occasioned the rise of the Republican Party as the vehicle for antislavery sentiment. Douglas had misjudged the growing moral concern over slavery, and the nation was aflame; the flame would not be extinguished for more than a decade of controversy and bloody war. The situation was so critical as to make impossible an effective concentration by the government on other issues deserving of attention. The man who in 1850 and 1853 wanted to avoid the slavery issue and sought to consolidate and unify the United States became an instrument of its division.

Douglas’s association with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and his consistent failure to perceive the moral nature of the slavery question would haunt the rest of Douglas’s abbreviated political career. It would frustrate his efforts to secure his party’s nomination for the presidency in 1856 and would cost him dearly in the momentous election in 1860 that Abraham Lincoln won. In between, in 1858, Douglas defeated the Republican Lincoln for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, but that was a small victory in the overall scheme of national life.

Significance

If ever a man represented the best and the worst of his times, it was Stephen A. Douglas. He was born in 1813 as the nation moved into an intensely nationalistic period; he lived through the Jacksonian period with its turbulent trends toward democracy; he died just as his beloved Union came apart in the Civil War. Douglas was devoted to the concept of democracy, but it was a democracy limited to white adult males. Given his view (widely held at the time) that black people were inferior beings, he saw no reason to be concerned about their civil rights—they simply had none. His political career was shaped by his love for the Union and by his desire to see the United States grow and expand, for he was truly a great nationalist. He thought in terms of the West and of the nation as a whole and did not constrict himself to a North-South view.

Douglas was, perhaps, the most talented politician of his generation, but his moral blindness, while understandable, was his tragic flaw. He alone among his contemporaries might have had the capacity and the vigor to deal with sectionalism and prevent the Civil War, but his fatal flaw kept him from the presidency. Once the war broke out, Douglas threw his support to his Republican rival Abraham Lincoln and in an attempt to rally northern Democrats to the cause of Union he said, “We must fight for our country and forget our differences.”

Beset by a variety of infirmities at the age of forty-eight, Douglas hovered near death in early June, 1861. On June 3, 1861, with his beloved second wife Adele by his bed, he died. His last spoken words, passed through Adele as advice for his young sons, suggest Douglas’s ultimate concern as a politician: “Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States.”

Bibliography

Capers, Gerald M. Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959. As the title suggests, this volume is generally pro-Douglas and forgives his moral blindness. It is fairly brief and is well written.

Hamilton, Holman. Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. A valuable work and one that was a pioneering effort in quantitative history. Hamilton uses statistics to analyze voting patterns and to clarify the way Douglas put the compromise together. The writing is excellent, as one might expect from a former newspaper man. Hamilton was the first historian to give Douglas the credit he deserved.

Johannsen, Robert W. The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Johannsen’s fifteen essays examine the issues of slavery, secession, and the nature of the Union during the 1850’s, contrasting the views of Douglas and Abraham Lincoln on these questions. Johannsen describes Douglas’s role as a spokesman for the Western frontier and an advocate for popular sovereignty, and explains his involvement in the election of 1860.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. This volume is the definitive work on Douglas. Johannsen is meticulous in his research, fair in his assessment, and thorough in his coverage.

Meyer, Daniel. Stephen A. Douglas and the American Union. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1994. Catalog of an exhibition held at the Library in 1994.

Nichols, Roy Frank. The Democratic Machine: 1850-1854. New York: Columbia University Press, 1923. While Nichols’s book is dated, it is still worth reading. The author probably knew more about the politics of the 1850’s than any single individual.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. This major interpretation puts Douglas’s political activity in the context of his times and provides many insights into his character.

Waugh, John C. On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003. An account of the congressional battling between Northern abolitionists, Southern secessionists, and moderates from both regions. Douglas is one of the lawmakers whose positions and actions on the compromise are examined.