stephen a. douglas
united states senator
biography
Born in Brandon, Vt., on Apr. 23, 1813, Douglas settled in Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar. He rose rapidly in the Democratic party, holding several state and local offices before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1843. From 1847 until his death, he was a U.S. senator.
He took an active part in politics from an early age, and due to his five foot stature and aggressive oratory he was known as the "Little Giant." His rise as a power in the Democratic Party was phenomenal; in 1835, he became the state’s attorney for the Morgan County circuit. In 1836 he was elected to the legislature and the next year became register of the Land Office of Springfield. In 1838, he was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress but by 1840 he was a chairman of the Democratic state committee and secretary of state.
A year later, at the age of 28, he became judge of the Illinois Supreme Court. In 1842 he was elected to Congress and served from March 4, 1843 until he resigned to become senator in 1847.
In the Senate, Douglas chaired the Committee on Territories, an important post because of the growing controversy over the extension of slavery into the territories. Although Douglas was one of the architects of the Compromise of 1850, he reopened the slavery issue in 1854 when he sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise. In its place, he advocated the doctrine of popular sovereignty, whereby territorial settlers would be allowed to decide on the slavery issue after they achieved statehood. The issue persisted, however, and Kansas was soon in turmoil.
Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Act provided that the people in these territories should decide whether the territories would join the Union as slave or as free states. The act was opposed by the antislavery leaders. Among these was Abraham Lincoln. In 1858 he ran against Douglas for the senatorship from Illinois, basing his campaign on the Kansas-Nebraska issue. Douglas won the senatorship. In the debate at Freeport, Ill., however, he was led to declare that any territory could by "unfriendly legislation" exclude slavery. This statement antagonized the South.
Douglas was bypassed for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1856, largely because of the situation in "bleeding Kansas." In 1857 he broke with President James Buchanan over the latter's support of the proslavery forces in Kansas. This alienated Douglas from Southern Democrats. In 1858, Douglas defeated Lincoln in a hard-fought senatorial campaign. The well-publicized Lincoln-Douglas debates, however, helped bring Lincoln to national attention while further alienating Douglas from Southern Democrats because of his inability to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision (1857).
When the national Democratic convention met in 1860, the Southern delegates bolted the party rather than support Douglas for president. At a separate convention they named John C. Breckinridge as their candidate. The Northern Democrats nominated Douglas as their candidate. The split in the party made the election of Lincoln, the Republican candidate, a foregone conclusion.
Douglas now devoted his energy to opposing secession and loyally pledged his support to Lincoln and the Union. This work was cut short by his death from typhoid fever on June 6, 1861, in Chicago.
