geeky
Douglas was an Illinois Senator who was nicknamed the "Little Giant" because he was small in stature, but a giant on the political stage. At birth he was named Stephen Arnold Douglass and was born in Brandon, Vermont on April 23, 1813. His parents were Stephen Arnold Douglass and Sarah Fisk. Douglas dropped the second "s" from his name some years later. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Winchester, Illinois in 1833, where he worked as an itinerant teacher, teaching school for three months at three dollars a pupil. He also studied law, and settled in Jacksonville, Illinois. Douglas briefly courted Mary Todd (who later married Abraham Lincoln), but in March 1847 he married Martha Martin, the 21-year-old daughter of wealthy Colonel Robert Martin of North Carolina. The year after their marriage, her father died and Martha inherited a 2,500-acre cotton plantation with 100 slaves, in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Douglas hired a manager to operate the plantation, while using his share of the income to advance his political career.
The young couple moved from Springfield to Chicago in the summer of 1847. They had two sons: Robert M. Douglas (January 1849-1917) and Stephen Arnold Douglas, Jr. (November 1850-1908). Martha Douglas died young on January 19, 1853, after the birth of her third child, a daughter. The baby died a few weeks later. On November 20, 1856, the 43 year old Douglas married a second time, to 20-year-old Adele Cutts, a southern woman whose great-aunt was former First Lady Dolley Madison.
Douglas was appointed as State's Attorney of Morgan County in 1834, serving until 1836. In the next few years, Douglas became a leader of the Illinois Democrats. He was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, was appointed Illinois Secretary of State, and was appointed an associate justice of the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841, at age 27. Douglas resigned from the Court upon being elected US Representative in 1843, and was re-elected in 1844. In Congress, he supported territorial expansion and supported the Mexican War. In 1846 the Illinois General Assembly elected him a US Senator.
In 1850, Douglas was one of the strongest advocates of compromise when it looked like the issue of slavery would cause some states to secede. He supported the proposals of Henry Clay, despite their partisan differences (Clay was a Whig). When Clay's "omnibus" bill for the Compromise of 1850 was defeated, Douglas divided the parts of the Compromise into separate bills, and was able to steer a compromise through Congress. By 1852, Douglas was considered one of the Democratic party leaders. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852, but was unable to win a two-thirds majority and the party selected "dark horse" Franklin Pierce.
Douglas was an avid promoter of railroad expansion. Douglas hoped that a national railway would more thoroughly integrate the regional economies and reduce sectional tensions. Douglas was one of the leaders for passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Nebraska Territory, west of Missouri, was being settled, and Congress needed to provide territorial organization for the region. The Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery there (because it was north of the 36°30' compromise line). His activity was tied to proposals for a transcontinental railroad to California. One route was proposed to go through Chicago, where Douglas owned real estate, expected to boom if the central route was adopted. Southern leaders agreed to support the central route if slavery was permitted in the new Territories. Douglas agreed. His legislation allowed the people in the Territory to decide whether to permit or exclude slavery, not Congress.
"Free-soil" and anti-slavery Northerners strongly opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But Congress passed the Act by the votes of some Northern Democrats and of all Southerners, Democrat and Whig alike. Opponents of the Act saw it as a triumph for Slavery. The Whig Party dissolved and anti-slavery Northern Whigs formed the Republican Party.
In 1856, Douglas was again a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and received strong support at the convention, but again was passed over when the party settled on James Buchanan. His "popular sovereignty" doctrine that slavery should be decided on locally by states and territories was satisfactory to Southerners who didn't want outside interference with slavery and Northerners who didn't want to take sides over it.
Then in 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, which declared that under the Constitution, neither Congress nor a Territorial legislature created by Congress had the power to prohibit slavery in a Territory. This made the Kansas-Nebraska Act irrelevant. President James Buchanan tried to get Kansas admitted as a slave state. But the anti-slavery majority in Kansas rejected this. Douglas strongly opposed Buchanan's machinations, and the two became enemies.
The Illinois legislature election in 1858 was critical because it would decide which party would select a US Senator in 1859: either Douglas or a Republican challenger. This set the stage for the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The Democrats selected Douglas and the Republicans named Lincoln as their choice for the senate seat. Douglas tried to avoid meeting Lincoln and traveled the state, making speeches for the Democratic party. Lincoln followed Douglas around the state, answering each Douglas speech with one of his own a day or two later. After several such incidents, Douglas agreed to seven formal joint appearances, now known as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
In the debates, Douglas reiterated his support of popular sovereignty. He criticized Lincoln for his insistence that slavery was a moral issue that had to be resolved by the nation as a whole. Douglas described this as causing an unnecessary conflict between free and slave states, which threatened to boil up into disunion and war. He also asserted that Lincoln supported civil and social equality between the races, and insinuated that Lincoln even accepted racial intermarriage. Douglas declared that the Declaration of Independence was not meant to apply to non-whites.
For his part, Lincoln criticized Douglas for his moral indifference to slavery, but denied any intention of interference with slavery in the South. He suggested that Douglas, Buchanan, and Chief Justice Taney worked together to extend and perpetuate slavery. Lincoln denied the radical views on racial equality attributed to him by Douglas, arguing only for the right of slaves to personal liberty and to earn their own living.
Regardless of which of the two was more persuasive in the debates, in the 1858 legislative elections, the Democrats won a narrow majority of seats, and Douglas was re-elected by a vote in the Illinois legislature of 54 to 46.
Douglas was the leading nominee for the Democrats as their presidential candidate in the election of 1860, despite the opposition of President Buchanan. However, Douglas faced opposition in the Deep South. When the 1860 Democratic National Convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, Douglas supporters included half of the delegates, but very few from the South. Southern delegates wanted Congress to enact a slave code for all the Territories, but Douglas supporters said that with such a platform, they would lose every Northern state. The Convention rejected a slave code, prompting 50 delegates from seven Southern states to withdraw. Douglas received 150 votes out of 250 cast for the nomination, but the Convention's rules required a 2/3 majority for a nomination, and after 57 ballots, the convention adjourned on May 3. Douglas was 17 votes short. The convention reconvened on June 18 in Baltimore, Maryland. After replacement delegates were seated in place of some of the withdrawn delegates, Douglas was nominated by an overwhelming majority. The bolted Southern Democrats nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge. Some former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell as their candidate for president.
During the subsequent campaign, Douglas broke convention by campaigning in person. He went on speaking tours across the country. Douglas campaigned energetically, attacking abolitionism in the North, and anti-unionism in the South. In early October, after Republicans won state elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Douglas said "Mr. Lincoln is the next President. We must try to save the Union. I will go south." He went to the South to rally Unionist sentiment. Despite his aggressive campaigning, Douglas was defeated. He received 1,376,957 popular votes (second at 29%), but only 12 electoral votes (fourth and last at 4%), with Lincoln receiving 180.
Douglas urged the South to acquiesce to Lincoln's election, and tried to arrange a compromise which would avoid secession. As late as Christmas 1860, he wrote to Alexander H. Stephens and offered to support the annexation of Mexico as slave territory. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Lincoln decided to proclaim a state of rebellion and call for 75,000 troops to suppress it. Douglas looked over the proclamation before it was issued and endorsed it completely. He suggested only one change. He told Lincoln that he should call for 200,000 troops, not just 75,000. 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.
At Lincoln's first inauguration, Lincoln took the oath of office, then took off his "stovepipe" hat in preparation for giving his inaugural address. But he had nowhere to set down the hat. Douglas, who was on the platform, stepped forward and took the hat from Lincoln's hands. Moving back, he remarked "If I can't be the President, at least I can hold his hat."
But Douglas was unable to do more to support the union effort. Early on in the war, Douglas died in Chicago from typhoid fever on June 3, 1861.