Stephen A. Douglas
was a U.S. senator, a leading advocate of “popular sovereignty,”
the drafter of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854,
and the presidential nominee of the Northern wing of the
Democratic Party in 1860.
He was born on April 23, 1813, in Brandon, Vermont, to Sarah
Fisk Douglass and Stephen Arnold Douglass (the younger Douglas
dropped the final “s” from his family name in 1846). His father
died when Stephen was an infant, and his mother moved the family
in with her father and bachelor brother. In his youth, Douglas
worked as an apprentice cabinetmaker. He was politically
inspired by the presidential campaign of General Andrew Jackson
in 1828 and became a life-long Democrat. In 1830, his family
moved to Canandaigua in upstate New York, where he studied at
the town’s academy.
In 1833, Douglas began to read law at a local law office, but
impatiently stopped after six months and moved to the “West,”
where training and qualification for the bar were less
stringent. His journey took him through Cleveland, Cincinnati,
Louisville, and St. Louis before he put down stakes in
Jacksonville, Illinois, in November 1833. The next year, he was
admitted to the Illinois bar, although the administering judge
urged him to continue his legal studies.
Douglas was one of the pioneers at adapting the new
Jacksonian party system—with its committees, conventions and
partisanship—to Illinois. He became a leader in the state
Democratic Party, and was elected state’s attorney before he
turned 22. In 1836, he was elected to the state house of
representatives, but the next year he moved to Springfield and
was appointed to the land office of the new state capital. In
1840, he became secretary of state, but was appointed the
following year to the state supreme court, the youngest justice
ever to serve in that body. In 1838, he had narrowly lost a race
for Congress, and in 1842 was unsuccessful in a bid for the U.S.
Senate (he was not of legal age to qualify). He finally won a
seat in the U.S. House the next year after the Illinois
legislature implemented a redistricting plan. He served two
terms in the House, and then won election in 1846 to the first
of three consecutive terms in the U.S. Senate.
In the Senate (1847-1861), Douglas became a leader of the
Northern Democrats, and played a pivotal role in the major
issues of one of the most crucial periods in the nation’s
history. Nicknamed the “Little Giant,” the diminutive Senator
(5' 4") was a scrappy fighter and a tireless worker, whose
powerful orations on the Senate floor drew capacity crowds to
the galleries. He was both an advocate of states’ rights and an
avid Unionist.
Douglas was also a promoter of America’s territorial
expansion to fulfill its “manifest destiny,” as a catchphrase of
the time put it, to become a continental republic from sea to
shining sea. To that end, he supported the annexation of Texas
and of the entire Oregon Territory and backed the expansionist
war against Mexico. To encourage settlement of the new American
West, Douglas proposed homestead legislation and pushed Congress
to subsidize a transcontinental railroad to run from the
Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast. As chairman of the
Committee on Territories in, first, the House and, later, the
Senate, he sponsored bills to establish seven territories:
Oregon, Minnesota, Utah, New Mexico, Washington, Kansas, and
Nebraska.
The Mexican War (1846-1848) raised the issue of whether
slavery would be allowed to expand into the lands acquired from
Mexico. Douglas took a middle ground between the Northern
anti-slavery view that the federal government could ban slavery
in the territories and the Southern pro-slavery position that
the Constitution protected the institution there. Instead, he
advocated what he believed was a more democratic, fair, and
workable solution: let the voters of each territory decide
the issue themselves (i.e., “popular sovereignty”). The
Illinois senator was instrumental in the passage of the
Compromise of 1850, which allowed the Utah and New Mexico
territories to be organized on the basis of popular sovereignty,
while permitting California to enter as a free state, which its
residents overwhelmingly desired. He personally believed that
slavery was ill suited for transplantation to the West, and that
settlers there would reject it.
In order to accelerate the settlement of the west, Douglas
drafted and introduced a bill to establish two territorial
governments in part of the territory of the Louisiana Purchase
(1803). By allowing the citizens of the territories to vote on
the slavery issue, Douglas’s
Kansas-Nebraska Act
of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in that
area. Passage of the bill ignited a political firestorm that
caused the collapse of the Whig party, the birth of the
Republican Party, and the widening of the gulf between the
Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party. In the rest
of the 1850s, sectional politics because more volatile and
violent. In Kansas, pro- and anti-slavery forces established
competing territorial governments and engaged in bloody
guerrilla war.
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the
Dred Scott
case that slavery was, as many Southerners had
insisted, constitutionally protected from interference by
federal or territorial government. That decision undercut
Douglas’s remedy of popular sovereignty, but he responded with
his “Freeport Doctrine” (named after one of the sites of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates). He argued that territorial citizens
could circumvent the letter of the decision by refusing to pass
legislation (“slave codes”) that supported and protected the
institution; consequently, he reasoned, slaveowners would not
venture to a territory where their investment in slaves would be
insecure.
Douglas’s tactical response to the Dred Scott decision
angered Southern Democrats. During the winter of 1857-1858, he
further alienated himself from Southern Democrats and their
northern allies, such as President James Buchanan, when he
vehemently opposed the Lecompton Constitution, drafted by the
proslavery factional legislature in Kansas.
Later in 1858 Douglas held a series of seven debates with his
Republican senatorial challenger, Abraham Lincoln. The sole
topic discussed was the issue of slavery, and because Douglas
was a major figure in national politics, the debates received
national press coverage. The debates matched two powerful
thinkers and hard-hitting speakers and are justifiably famous in
American history. Although Douglas was reelected to the Senate
by the Democratic state legislature, Lincoln became a national
name for the first time and a contender for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1860.
Douglas had been a losing candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 1852 and 1856, but was in a position
to take the prize in 1860. The Democratic National Convention
met in April 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina. The Southern
delegates arrived determined to have the party endorse in its
platform a federal slave code for the territories. The Northern
delegates, led by Douglas, were equally adamant that their party
would not endorse a territorial slave code. The fierce
disagreement led many Southern delegates to walk out of the
convention and reconvene in Baltimore, where they nominated Vice
President John C. Breckinridge for the presidency. Northern
Democrats also reconvened in Baltimore and nominated Douglas for
the presidency. Meanwhile, Republicans nominated Lincoln for
president, and a group of former Whigs organized the
Constitutional Union party, which nominated Senator John Bell of
Tennessee for president.
It
was customary that presidential candidates did not campaign
actively for the office. Douglas broke that tradition, however,
to undertake a speaking tour in the areas where his opposition
was strongest, New England and the South. He urged Southerners
not to leave the Union if Lincoln were elected. When the
Republican’s election did provoke the secession of seven states
from the Deep South, Douglas searched for a compromise that
would save the Union. Once the Civil War began I April 1861, he
pledged his support to President Lincoln and the fight to save
the Union. Stephen Douglas died in Chicago on June 3, 1861,
while on a trip to secure Illinois’ support for the Union cause.
His final words were a message for his sons: “Tell them to obey
the laws and support the Constitution of the United States. |