STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
AND THE
AMERICAN UNION
1. Politics on the Illinois Frontier
The political career of Stephen A. Douglas was linked indelibly to the prairie state of Illinois. Yet Douglas, like many of his Illinois constituents, was not a native Westerner.
He was born in Brandon, Vermont, on April 23, 1813. His father, physician Stephen Arnold Douglass, died unexpectedly when the baby was only two months old. Young Stephen was raised by his widowed mother, Sarah Fiske Douglass, and an unmarried uncle who lived nearby. As a boy, he worked for a cabinetmaker and studied briefly at a local academy, but his real passion was politics. In the presidential election of 1828, fifteen-year-old Stephen fastened upon General Andrew Jackson as the symbol of American democracy and roamed the area ripping down the opposition's handbills.
When his mother married Gehazi Granger in 1830, Stephen moved with them to upstate New York. He enrolled in another academy and distinguished himself by vigorously defending Andrew Jackson's policies in the school debating club. But his educational career was brief, and within a few years he had begun to read the law under the tutelage of a locally prominent Democratic attorney.
In June 1833, driven by inner restlessness and a need to be self-supporting, twenty-year-old Stephen reached the momentous decision to head west and seek his fortune. He made his way to Cleveland, then down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi to St. Louis. He found few prospects for immediate success along the way, but the wide open prairies of Illinois promised rich possibilities for an ambitious young man. Nearly out of cash, Stephen bought a final upriver steamboat ticket and disembarked at Quincy, Illinois, in the late autumn of 1833.
Other New Englanders had found the crude society of frontier Illinois a jarring disappointment. By contrast, Stephen A. Douglas, as he now wrote his surname, saw abundant opportunity in an unshaped culture open to all comers. After briefly operating a private school, Douglas secured a law license, set up practice in Jacksonville, Illinois, and plunged into the swirl of Democratic politics.
Douglas first attracted public attention with his vociferous loyalty to Andrew Jackson. In one public debate, Douglas delivered a rousing pro-Jackson speech in the Jacksonville courthouse. Thoroughly won over, his supporters bore Douglas out of the hall on their shoulders and dubbed him the "Little Giant," a moniker he would carry for the rest of his life.
Douglas was already marked by a compelling personal charisma. Though short-legged and stocky, he commanded immediate attention with his impressively proportioned head, mass of dark hair, and penetrating eyes. More than anything else, listeners were swayed by his quick intelligence and his deep, resonant voice, which carried easily to the farthest reaches of a political crowd.
Douglas's strong convictions and sharp political instincts soon propelled him on a meteoric rise in Illinois politics. Between 1835 and 1840, he held a succession of state offices, some of them concurrently: state's attorney, state legislator, "register" of the Springfield land office, and secretary of state. In 1841, still only twenty-seven years old, he was elected to a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court.
Despite his quick success in state politics, Douglas had difficulty moving on to the U.S. Congress. In 1838, he lost a disputed race for the House by thirty-six popular votes. Four years later, still too young to meet the constitutional age requirement, he lost a campaign for a U.S. Senate seat by five legislative votes. Finally, in 1843, competing in a newly created congressional district, Douglas won a seat in the House.
When he arrived in Washington, Douglas turned his maiden speech on the House floor into a ringing defense of Andrew Jackson. As a congressman, Douglas also staked out positions on national expansion, urging extension of the American Union from coast to coast to create an "ocean-bound republic." He called for the annexation of Texas, the establishment of military posts along Western emigrant trails, and the organization of a Nebraska territorial government. He pressed for the creation of a territorial government in Oregon and joined Democratic nationalists in demanding that the American border with British Canada be set as far north as possible. By 1845, these strong expansionist positions secured for Douglas the chairmanship of the House Committee on Territories.
The war with Mexico in 1846-48 confronted Douglas with a more volatile issue, the expansion of slavery. Against those who would have barred slavery from newly acquired Mexican lands, Douglas argued for a more moderate position: retaining the Missouri Compromise line separating slave and free territories, and deferring any decision on slavery south of that line until the future organization of individual territorial governments. A man of New England roots and Western character, Douglas was sensitive to the potential danger of competing sectional interests. He firmly believed that the United States was destined to span the continent. And he was determined that the slavery issue should not be permitted to disrupt national growth and prosperity or threaten the integrity of the American Union.
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS AND THE AMERICAN UNION