Stephen A.

Douglas

Born: 23-Apr-1813 Died: 3-Jun-1861 Occupation: Politician Nationality: United States

Birthplace: Brandon, VT Race or Ethnicity: White Party Affiliation: Democratic Executive summary: US Senator

Bio The American statesman Stephen A. Douglas was born at Brandon, Vermont, on the 23rd of April 1813. His father, a physician, died in July 1813, and the boy was under the care of a bachelor uncle until he was fourteen, when his uncle married and Douglas was thrown upon his own resources. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in Middlebury, Vermont, and then to another in Brandon, but soon abandoned this trade. He attended schools at Brandon and Canandaigua (NY), and began the study of law. In 1833 he went West, and finally settled in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar in March 1834, and obtained a large practice. From the first he took an active interest in politics, identifying himself with the Jackson Democrats, and his rise was remarkably rapid even for the Middle West of that period. In February 1835 he was elected public prosecutor of the first judicial circuit, the most important at that time in Illinois; in December 1836 he became a member of the state legislature. In 1840 he did much to carry the state for Van Buren; and for a few months he was secretary of state of Illinois. He was a judge of the supreme court of Illinois from 1841 to 1843. In 1843 he was elected to the national House of Representatives. An enthusiastic believer in the destiny of his country and more especially of the West, and a thoroughgoing expansionist, he heartily favored in Congress the measures which resulted in the annexation of Texas and in the Mexican War -- in the discussion of the annexation of Texas he suggested as early as 1845 that the states to be admitted should come in slave or free, as their people should vote when they applied to Congress for admission, thus foreshadowing his doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty." In the bitter debates concerning the keenly disputed question of the permission of slavery in the territories, Douglas was particularly prominent. Against slavery itself he seems never to have had any moral antipathy; he married (1847) the daughter of a slaveholder, Colonel Robert Martin of North Carolina, and a cousin of Douglas's colleague in Congress, D. S. Reid; and his wife and children were by inheritance the owners of slaves, though he himself never was. He did more probably than any other one man, except Henry Clay, to secure the adoption of the Compromise Measures of 1850. In Congress, Douglas's name was soon to become identified with the so-called "popular sovereignty" or "squatter sovereignty" theory, previously enunciated by Lewis Cass, by which each territory was to be left to decide for itself whether it should or should not have slavery. The passage of this Kansas-Nebraska Bill, one of the most momentous in its consequences ever passed by the Federal Congress, was largely a personal triumph for Douglas, who showed marvelous energy, adroitness and resourcefulness, and a genius for leadership. In 1852, and again in 1856, he was a candidate for the Presidential nomination in the national Democratic convention, and though on both occasions he was unsuccessful, he received strong support. In 1858, he engaged in Illinois a close and very exciting contest for the senatorship with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, whom he met in a series of debates (at Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton), in one of which, that at Freeport, Douglas was led to declare that any territory, by "unfriendly legislation", could exclude slavery, no matter what the action of the Supreme Court. This, the famous "Freeport Doctrine", lost to Douglas the support of a large element of his party in the South, and in Illinois his followers did not poll so large a vote as Lincoln's. Douglas, however, won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54 to 46.