Stephen A. Douglas
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| Stephen Arnold Douglas | |
| Born | April 23, 1813 Brandon, Vermont |
|---|---|
Stephen Arnold Douglas (April 23, 1813 – June 3, 1861), known as the "Little Giant", was an American politician from the frontier state of Illinois, and was one of two Democratic Party nominees for President in 1860, along with John C. Breckenridge. 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; he authored the highly controversial Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 that reopened the slavery question.
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[edit] Early career
Born in Vermont, he came to Illinois in 1833 at age 20, was an itinerant teacher, studied law, and settled in Jacksonville. By the end of the year, he told his Vermont relatives, "I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings principles and interests and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption." Within a decade, he was elected to the state legislature, and was appointed register of the Springfield Land Office, Illinois Secretary of State, and an associate justice of the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841, at age 27. A leader of the majority Democratic party, he was elected twice to Congress (1842 and 1844), where he championed expansion and supported the Mexican-American War. Elected by the legislature to the Senate in 1847, he was reelected in 1853 and 1859. He contested the 1858 legislative elections by going head to head with Lincoln in a series of nationally famous debates.
Douglas was the main promoter of the Compromise of 1850; although Henry Clay usually gets more credit, it was Douglas who managed to pass the necessary bills using his remarkable skills as a legislator. <ref> Russel 1956</ref>He moved to Chicago, gaining wealth by marriage to a Mississippi woman who inherited a slave plantation. An avid promoter of westward expansion, he devised the land grant system that enabled the funding of the Illinois Central railroad. <ref> Johannsen (1973) </ref>
Douglas always had a deep and abiding faith in democracy. "Let the people rule!" was his cry, and he insisted that the people locally could and should make the decisions about slavery, rather than the national government. He was passed over for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1852 and 1856.<ref> Dean 1995</ref>
[edit] Kansas-Nebraska 1854
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. <ref>Nichols 1956</ref>
[edit] Presidential aspirant
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 support 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.<ref> Johannsen (1973) </ref>
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 Senate seat 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.
Before and during the debates, Douglas repeatedly invoked racist rhetoric, claiming Lincoln was for black equality and saying at Galesburg that the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not intend to include blacks. "This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis . . . made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever," he said.<ref>Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1995, 222</ref> While Lincoln made racist statements (politically expedient in a state where the majority of voters were descended from Southerners<ref>Donald, 221</ref>), he did so mainly to respond to Douglas' aggressive invocation of white supremacy and pointedly denied Douglas' assertion that the Declaration of Independence did not include minorities.<ref>Donald, 222</ref>
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 democratic doctrine that emphasized equality of all citizens (only whites were citizens), in which individual merit and social mobility was not a main goal. [Stevenson 1994] Douglas 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.<ref> Johannsen (1973) </ref>
In the 1860 Democratic national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, the failure to adopt a slave code to the territories in the platform brought about the withdrawal from the convention of delegations from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Arkansas. The convention adjourned to Baltimore, Maryland, 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 (2nd at 29%) he received an electoral vote of only 12 (4th and last at 4%) - Lincoln receiving 180 (see: U.S. presidential election, 1860). His support in the North came from the Irish Catholics and the poorer farmers; in the South the irish Catholics were his main supporters. <ref> Johannsen (1973) </ref>
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 Midwest to rouse the spirit of Unionism; he spoke in West Virginia, Ohio and Illinois.
[edit] Personal and family
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. He came to Illinois as an itinerant teacher and soon rose in Democratic party politics.
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 (one of whom was Robert M. Douglas). On November 20, 1856, he married 20 year-old Adele Cutts, the daughter of James Madison Cutts and a great-niece of Dolley Madison.<ref> Clinton 1988</ref>
[edit] Death and legacy
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.
Today, there are Douglas Counties in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, South Dakota and Nevada are named after him, as is Douglas, Georgia. Douglas's great-great-great grandson Robert Martin Douglas II currently resides in Charlottesville, VA and is an acclaimed filmmaker.
[edit] References
<references/>
[edit] Primary sources
- Robert W. Johannsen, ed. The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (1961)
- Paul M. Angle, ed., Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (1958),
- Lincoln, Abraham and Douglas, Stephen A. The Lincoln-douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text. Harold Holzer, Ed. Harpercollins, 1993.
- Douglas, Stephen Arnold. A brief treatise upon constitutional and party questions, and the history of political parties, (1861) James Madison Cutts, ed. (1866)
Text supplemented from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
[edit] Further reading
- Capers, Gerald M. Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union (1959), short biography
- Clinton, Anita Watkins. "Stephen Arnold Douglas - His Mississippi Experience" Journal of Mississippi History 1988 50(2): 56-88. in JSTOR
- 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), 993pp the standard biography
- Johannsen, Robert W. The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas U. of Illinois Press, 1989.
- Milton, George Fort. The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (1934)
- 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. highly detailed narrative of nation politics with extensive coverage of Douglas
- Nichols, Roy F. "The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (1956): 187-212; in JSTOR
- Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1920) vol 1-2, detailed narrative
- Russel, Robert R. "What Was the Compromise of 1850?" Journal of Southern History 20 (1956): 292-309 in JSTOR
- Russel, Robert R. "The Issues in the Congressional Struggle Over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854," Journal of Southern History 29 (May 1963): 187-210; in JSTOR
- 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 Press, 1990. 309 pp
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Project Gutenberg text of Life of Stephen A. Douglas by William Gardner
- 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.
- Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
| Preceded by: James Semple | United States Senator (Class 2) from Illinois 1847 – 1861 Served alongside: Sidney Breese, James Shields, Lyman Trumbull | Succeeded by: Orville H. Browning |
| Preceded by: James Buchanan | Democratic Party Presidential candidate 1860 (lost) | Succeeded by: George McClellan |
| United States Democratic Party Presidential Nominees |
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