Stephen A. Douglas
Stephen Douglas is also the name of a member of the band The Trash Can Sinatras.Stephen Arnold Douglas (
April 23,
1813 –
June 3,
1861),
American politician from
Illinois, was one of the
Democratic Party nominees 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.
Stephen A. Douglas defeated Abraham Lincoln in the 1858 Illinois Senate race.
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, where Douglas won just Missouri and New Jersey.
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 prestige 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 senatorship 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 whites-only doctrine that ignored work and merit as criteria for individual advancement. [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 he received an electoral vote of only 12 - Lincoln receiving 180 (see:
U.S. presidential election, 1860).
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.
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. 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.
Douglas Counties in
Illinois,
Kansas,
Nebraska,
Washington,
Oregon,
Minnesota,
South Dakota and
Nevada are named after him; as is
Douglas, Georgia.
*
Origins of the American Civil War* Allen Johnson
Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics (New York, 1908)
* 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
* 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
* 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.
* Johannsen, Robert W.
Stephen A. Douglas 1973, reprinted U. of Illinois Press 1997; 993pp the standard biography
* Johannsen, Robert W. "The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas
U. of Illinois Press, 1989.
* 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
.
* James Ford Rhodes History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850
(1920) vol 1-2
* 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'' U. of Chicago Pr., 1990. 309
Primary sources
* Robert W. Johannsen, ed.
The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (1961)
* Lincoln, Abraham and Douglas, Stephen A.
The Lincoln-douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text. Harold Holzer, Ed. Harpercollins, 1993.
Text supplemented from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica*
Project Gutenberg text of
Life of Stephen A. Douglas by William Gardner
*
A Breif Treatise on Constitutional and Party Issues. A History of Political Parties.*
Page images of two Speechs made by Douglas, one on the Comprimise of 1850*
Speech made before the NY State Agricultural Society*
Association dedicated to preservation of Douglas history. Site contains many speeches and images.
