Douglas

Stephen A. Douglas of Quincy

“I have become a Western man,” declared 20-year-old Stephen A. Douglas within a month after his arrival in Illinois in November 1833. It was characteristic bravado for the young man who soon would envision an “ocean-bound republic” – and would be the leader in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to achieve it.

Since boyhood in Vermont, Douglas (who spelled his surname Douglass until October 1846) had worshipped Andrew Jackson and his style of Democracy. Like Jackson, Douglas believed in the virtues of the common people. And like Jackson, he was an expansionist, nationalist and opportunist. His vigorous defense of Old Hickory in Jacksonville, Illinois, in early 1834 the state’s Whig bastion, earned him the sobriquet, “Little Giant.” The title fitted the five-feet, four-inch politician who would become the leader of his county, state and national Democratic party.

His friend Lincoln would call Douglas’s political rise “meteoric.” They had met in Vandalia during Lincoln’s first term as a legislator in the Illinois House of Representatives. Douglas was lobbying legislators for a bill that would benefit himself. At the time, Lincoln considered Douglas “the least man I ever saw.” By age 27, though, Douglas had been lawyer, Morgan County states attorney, Illinois State Representative, federal land register, Illinois Secretary of State and Judge of the Illinois Supreme Court’s Fifth Judicial District, headquartered in Quincy. By skilled political tactics, he maneuvered himself into each of those offices.

Douglas was the trial judge who found Dr. Richard Eells, a fellow Quincyan, guilty for aiding a runaway Missouri Slave in 1842.

His assignment to Quincy in 1841 was not by chance. A consummate strategist and always the opportunist, Douglas coveted a seat in Congress. Within a year of becoming a Supreme Court judge, he made his first attempt for the office, losing to Lincoln’s former law partner John Todd Stuart by only 35 votes of 35,000 cast. He was aware of the large Mormon vote in Nauvoo, just north of Quincy. And because he had been the Illinois Secretary of State who helped lobby for and issued an extremely liberal charter to Joseph Smith’s City of Nauvoo, Douglas believed he could count on Smith for that large Mormon vote. When he ran again for Congress in 1843, however, Douglas didn’t get it.

But he won enough votes in the election to beat Quincy Whig Orville Hickman Browning and become the U.S. Representative from the Fifth Congressional District. In doing so, he fulfilled a promise he had made to his mother. As he left home in 1833, his mother Sarah asked when she could expect a visit from him. Historians record that the 20-year-old Douglas answered, “On my way to Congress, Mother.”

SAD Quincy Home Cropped

Judge S.A. Douglas’s Quincy Home
Northwest Corner
Third and Jersey Streets
(Razed 1955)

Voters in his Quincy-based district reelected Douglas in 1845 to Congress, and in 1846 the Illinois Legislature elected him to the United States Senate. Now representing the entire state, Douglas, who had lived in Quincy six years, moved to Chicago. He would transfer his residence from Quincy in 1848.

Douglas’s work to organize the territories and states west of the Mississippi brought him national fame. In 1852, at age 39, he was a Democratic presidential candidate.

His reputation continued to grow. He became chairman of the powerful Committee on the Territories in both the House and then the Senate. In the role, Douglas was responsible for organizing territories and states west of the Mississippi. A master at compromise, he guided the organization of all but two states in that land mass.

After Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman” Henry Clay failed in a months-long attempt to win a compromise to quell growing North-South strife, Douglas in six weeks passed the six resolutions that produced the Compromise of 1850. Despite increasing antagonisms between the sections over slavery, Douglas fashioned coalitions of northern and southern Congressmen to pass the bills. As he had done in the organization of other states and territories, Douglas had worked a compromise that held the union together

The compromise, however, proved to be only temporary. Douglas’s efforts to build the nation continued to grow more and more complicated because of agitation over slavery’s expansion. In 1854, Douglas – with important help from Democratic friend William A. Richardson of Quincy, who had taken Douglas’s place in the House – passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act with provisions Douglas believed would satisfy North and South.

But neither section liked its two key provisions: the repeal of the Missouri Compromise (which had limited slavery to an area south of Missouri’s southern border) and its replacement, called “popular sovereignty,” which now allowed a state’s voters to decide on slavery. The North did not want to risk the chance of slavery’s expansion – and some (including Lincoln) believed it would be wrong to legalize something so immoral as slavery. And the South didn’t want to chance that voters would not expand it.

On his way home after the session, Douglas saw the degree of his country’s disgust with Kansas-Nebraska. The entire trip back to Illinois, he said, was illuminated by the effigies of him he saw his countrymen burning.

Lincoln, who had left political life in 1848 after a single lackluster term in Congress, was drawn back by Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln had been willing to accept the constitution’s allowance of slavery where it had existed. He believed that the founders, unable to win the South’s approval of the Constitution without an allowance for slavery, had put the “peculiar institution” on a “path to ultimate extinction.” But he feared that Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had changed the calculus and was another step toward permitting slavery in free states. Lincoln accused Douglas of being part of a conspiracy which, with the recent Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, appeared to be opening wider slavery’s door.

Lincoln challenged Douglas for Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat in 1858 . The sixth of the Seven Great Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred in Quincy on October 13. (Click here for a description.) Douglas won that election, but Lincoln’s views catapulted him to national attention and the presidency in 1860.

        From the time of his entry into Congress in 1843, Douglas had helped hold his party and country together. And in March 1861 he offered to President Lincoln to continue that effort. President Lincoln responded by commissioning Douglas to speak for the Union’s preservation. Douglas began a series of speeches, including his renowned “Save the Flag” speech to a Joint Session of the Illinois General Assembly on April 25. To the applause of Republicans and Democrats alike, Douglas declared, “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors.” Little more than a week earlier, Fort Sumter had been attacked to start the Civil War.

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        Nearly exhausted by the demands of his earlier presidential campaign, his speechmaking and his anxiety for the nation, a seriously ill Douglas returned on May 1 to his Chicago home. On the morning of June 3, 1861, Douglas’s doctors said his death was near. At 9 a.m., Douglas died of acute rheumatism and complications. The Little Giant, as he was named in Jacksonville some three decades earlier, was forty-eight years old.