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 – to which his neighbors in Quincy sent him ten years later – and the U.S. Senate to achieve it.

Since boyhood in Vermont, Douglas (who spelled his surname Douglass until October 1846) had venerated Andrew Jackson and his style of anti-aristocratic Democracy. Like Jackson, Douglas believed in the virtue and wisdom of the common people. “Let the people rule,” Jackson had declared. It was a concept that would find its way into Douglas’s political vernacular with his push for popular sovereignty almost as soon as he got to Congress. His vigorous defense of Old Hickory in Jacksonville, Illinois – in early 1834 the state’s Whig bastion, earned him the sobriquet, “Little Giant.” It was a title well suited for 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” and suggested to colleagues that they ignore him. Douglas, though, lobbied hard to pass the bill, which ejected from office one of the state’s most powerful Whigs to make way for the 21-year-old Douglas. Told only months earlier by an Illinois Supreme Court Justice that he was too unskilled to practice law, Douglas was now an Illinois attorney general.

By age 27, Douglas had been lawyer, attorney general for Morgan County, Illinois State Representative, federal land register, Illinois Secretary of State and Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court’s Fifth Judicial District, headquartered in Quincy. By skilled political tactics, he had maneuvered himself into each one of those offices.

At the time, Illinois Supreme Court Justices also served as circuit court judges. It was in the role of circuit judge that Douglas tried the case of Dr. Richard Eells, a fellow Quincyan who in 1842 had tried to help a runaway Missouri slave . Douglas found Eells guilty of violating the law. The case ultimately was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Douglas’s ruling.

Douglas’s assignment to Quincy in 1841 was not by chance. A consummate strategist and always the opportunist, Douglas had coveted a seat in Congress since he left his mother in New York. Within a year before becoming a Supreme Court Justice, he had 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. Named to the Supreme Court under a new law he had written to pack it with Democrats, Douglas asked former Quincy resident and now Illinois Governor Thomas Carlin to appoint him to the Fifth Judicial District, headquartered in Quincy. Carlin obliged. Douglas had a purpose in his request. 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. He didn’t need it.

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

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 in 1845 reelected Douglas to Congress, and in 1846 the Illinois Legislature elected him to the United States Senate. Now representing the entire state, Douglas and his wife, who had stayed in North Carolina to avoid Quincy, moved to Chicago.

Douglas’s work in the Congress to organize the territories and states west of the Mississippi brought him national fame. In 1852, at age 39, he was a presidential candidate from the “Young America” wing of the Democratic Party. The naive arrogance of some of the wing’s members – who referred to older Democrats of the party like Lewis Cass and James Buchanan as “old fogeys” – cost Douglas any chance of serious consideration, and he was forced to defer to Franklin Pierce the nomination.

Douglas’s reputation in Congress, however, continued to grow. He became chairman of the powerful Committee on the Territories in the House. The Senate created a similar committee for him when he moved to that chamber. In the role, Douglas was responsible for organizing the huge territory west of the Mississippi. A master at compromise, he guided the organization of all but two states in that land mass.

Douglas’s work thrust him into the middle of the nation’s most prolonged and greatest controversy, slavery. With the acquisition after the Mexican War of a huge Western land mass that included California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and more, the sections of the country debated whether the territory should be brought in slave or free. The South argued that slavery should be permitted in any territory in which the nation’s flag was unfurled. The North generally supported the Wilmot Proviso, which would prohibit slavery from the so-called “Mexican Cession.” (One of history’s greatly misunderstood proposals, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot’s proviso sought to protect the acquisition from slavery to prevent its occupation by any blacks.)

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 to end the storm over the Mexican Cession. Despite increasing antagonisms between the sections over slavery, Douglas had fashioned coalitions of northern and southern Congressmen to pass the bills. As he had done in the organization of other states and territories, Douglas once again had worked a compromise that held the union together

The compromise, however, proved to be only temporary. Douglas’s efforts to build the nation grew more complicated because of continuing 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 both North and South. It satisfied neither.

They disliked Kansas-Nebraska’s two key provisions: the repeal of the Missouri Compromise (which since 1820 had limited slavery to an area below Missouri’s southern border) and its replacement with “popular sovereignty,” which would take the controversy out of Congress by having local voters decide whether a new state would be slave or free. 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 just how disgusted his countrymen were with his Kansas-Nebraska bill. The entire trip back to Illinois, he told colleagues, was illuminated by the the light of his effigies burning across the countryside.

Lincoln, who had left political life in 1849 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 existed. He believed that the founders, convinced they would be unable to win the South’s approval of a unifying Constitution without an allowance for slavery, had accepted the “peculiar institution” but that they had placed it on a “path to ultimate extinction.” Now, Lincoln feared, Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had changed that calculus and, if left unchallenged, ultimately would allow 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 captured the nation’s attention and earned him the presidency in 1860.

From the time of his entry into Congress in 1843, Douglas had worked to hold his party and country together. And in March 1861, having failed in his exhaustive campaign to achieve his own ambition for the presidency, he offered to the man who had beaten him to continue that effort. President Lincoln responded by commissioning Douglas to speak in the Border States for the Union’s preservation.

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Stephen A. Douglas

City of Quincy Lincoln Bicentennial Commission 706 Maine Quincy, Illinois 62301

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. And the Civil War came.

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. At 9 a.m. June 3, 1861, he died of acute typhoid fever. The spirit of the Little Giant, as he had been named in Jacksonville three decades earlier, had ended. He was 48.

– By Reg Ankrom