Rutland County Vermont Biographies

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STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS.
From a painting in the Representatives Hall; At the Illinois State Capitol, Springfield.

STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS; On the 23rd of April, 1813, in the town of Brandon, on the western slope of the green hills of Vermont, was born a boy who was destined to a brilliant career as a politician, a career alike remarkable for its rapid progress and its untimely close. He was of Puritan ancestry, the son of a physician, and his name was Stephen Arnold Douglas. His father dying when Stephen was but a few months old, his youthful training devolved upon the mother, who lived to witness the successes of her son, and to see him laid in the tomb. He was provided with a good common school education, and up to his fifteenth year was engaged in ordinary farm work. He then learned, or attempted to learn, the cabinet-maker's trade, but this occupation was so detrimental to his health, that after about a year and a half he abandoned it. Having spent another year in advanced studies at Brandon Academy, he left Vermont to accompany his mother and step-father to Canandaigua, N. Y., at which place he attended an academy and read law until he was twenty.

In 1833 he set out with about a hundred dollars in his pocket, to seek his fortune in the West. A fit of sickness so reduced his little store, that upon arriving at Winchester, ILL., he had less than half a dollar remaining. Chance directed his steps to a country vendue, at which the auctioneer, having been suddenly left without a clerk, ventured to offer the position to the intelligent if somewhat shabby appearing stranger.

In less than a year from the time at which he began practice, Mr. Douglas was appointed Attorney-General of Illinois, and from that time until his death, he was almost uninterruptedly in the public service. He was elected to the Legislature, but resigned his seat in 1837 to accept from President Van Buren the position of Register of the Land Office at Springfield, and this position was in its turn resigned a year later, when he contested a seat in Congress. He had been the youngest member of the Legislature, and it was only in the interval between his nomination for congressional honors and his defeat by only five votes, that he attained the constitutional age of twenty-five which is required of representatives. Enthusiastic in his support of the principles of the Democratic Party, he aided in carrying his State for Van Buren in 1840, and was himself chosen as one of the five electors of Illinois.

In December of the same year, he was made Secretary of State of Illinois, but retained that office only until the following February, when he became a judge of the Supreme Court of the State, and in 1843 he resigned the judgeship to take his seat as a member of the National House of Representatives.

Mr. Douglas was twice re-elected. He quickly became a recognized leader on the Democratic side, and gave his support to all the measures which were promoted by that party; especially the annexation of Texas, which was successfully accomplished, and the settlement of the Oregon boundary at 54° 40' which was not. He likewise sustained President Polk's administration in the war with Mexico which it forced upon the country. Although elected to the thirtieth Congress in 1846, he did not take his seat in the Lower House, having been in the meantime chosen United States Senator. Swiftly, and without hindrance, he had risen from the obscurity of his rural home to this proud eminence, before reaching his thirty-fourth year. Neither wealth nor position was his by inheritance, yet both came to him through the energetic use of his native gifts. Open, frank and generous, he wielded an influence over the masses which has been rarely, if ever, equaled; logical and self-confident, rather than eloquent, endowed with more common sense than learning, he was a match for the ablest debaters. He was slightly under the average height, though stoutly built, and this circumstance, in connection with his great popularity, gained for him the sobriquet of the "Little Giant." In April, 1847, a month after he had entered the Senate, Mr. Douglas was married to a North Carolina lady, who died in 1853.

The State of Illinois is deeply indebted to Senator Douglas, who by obtaining government grants for railroads, and in every other possible way, was tireless in his endeavors to advance her prosperity.

He opposed the Wilmot Proviso, but favored the extension of the boundary line between free and slave territory, 36° 30', westward to the Pacific. The compromise measures of 1850 received his support, as they did that of many another seeker for votes, irrespective of party; for Mr. Douglas, having attained all but the highest position, was hard hit by the presidential fever. He was reelected to the Senate in 1852. In the same year his name was presented to the Democratic National Convention, but Mr. Pierce unexpectedly took the prize for which he longed.

The position of Senator Douglas on the slavery question differed materially from that of the pro-slavery extremists, and he became the leader of that wing of the Democratic Party which held, with him, that the people of the Territories had the right to decide whether slavery should or should not exist within their borders. This was his famous doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty," or as it was sometimes sneeringly termed, "Squatter Sovereignty," and its apparent justice gained for it considerable favor at the North. The doctrine was embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854, which was reported by Mr. Douglas, as Chairman of the Committee on Territories. Much of the indignation which the measure aroused at the North was vented upon its author; he was hung in effigy in various places, and even in his own Illinois where he had been almost idolized for twenty years, he experienced a serious loss of popularity. In Chicago he was denied a hearing, and narrowly escaped personal injury. But while the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was so obnoxious to the majority in the free States, it was regarded at the South as only a half-way measure at best, and what little gratitude they might feel toward Mr. Douglas in that his bill authorized the territorial settlers to foster slavery, was forgotten when they considered that it also authorized them to prohibit it, should they see fit.

On the 9th of November, 1857, a State Constitution was adopted by a convention which had been in session for about two months at Lecompton, Kan. The people of the territory were to be allowed to choose whether they would have this constitution "with slavery" or "without slavery," but were not permitted to reject it entirely, and in any case, the slaves already in Kansas were not to be interfered with. President Buchanan in his message to the opening session of the thirty-fifth Congress, urged the admission of Kansas under this constitution, but Mr. Douglas dissented, almost alone among the senators of his party, claiming that the principle of "popular sovereignty" required that the constitution should be submitted to the people for acceptance or rejection. On December 21, a vote was taken in Kansas upon acceptance "with or without slavery," and the Free State men declining to take part in the farce, the constitution with slavery was accepted by a very large majority.

On January 4, 1858, a vote was taken by order of the Territorial Legislature, when the pro-slavery party refusing in their turn to go to the polls, the constitution was almost unanimously rejected. On the 2nd of February, President Buchanan, ignoring the latter action, transmitted the Lecompton Constitution to Congress, with a message advising the admission of Kansas as a slave State. The Committee on Territories, to whom the matter was referred, reported in favor of admission, but Senator Douglas presented a minority report, and upon the ground that it deprived the people of Kansas of the power of regulating their domestic institutions, he combated the Lecompton constitution at every stage of the debate, which lasted until April 30, when it was decided to again submit the constitution to a popular vote, by which it was finally rejected.

The famous canvass for the Illinois senatorship in 1858 has been referred to in our sketch of Abraham Lincoln. The result was favorable to Mr. Douglas, who was a third time elected to the Senate. Shortly after the opening of Congress in December, however, he was made to feel the resentment of the administration, which was entirely under the control of the slaveholders, by being displaced from the chairmanship of the Committee on Territories. He had a second time failed to secure the presidential nomination in 1856, but he was now the first choice of the Northern wing of his party, and was received with great consideration in an extended tour through the country. In a letter denying his position, written in the summer of 1859, Mr. Douglas declared it to be his intention to decline any nomination, upon a platform which should favor the revival of the African slave trade, or affirm the doctrine that Congress possessed the right to establish slavery in the Territories. He took a prominent part in the bitter congressional debates on slavery in the early part of the year 1860.

The Democratic National Convention met at Charleston, April 23, 1860. The Southern politicians had long before determined, not only to oppose Mr. Douglas, but to disrupt the party, that there might be no doubt of the choice of a Republican president, giving them their desired pretext for rebellion. A week was consumed in preliminary action, and then the majority of the Southern delegates seceded. A large majority of the remaining members were supporters of Mr. Douglas, but not the necessary two-thirds, and after fifty seven ballots, the convention adjourned, to meet at Baltimore in June. The seceders also adjourned without making a nomination. Reassembling on June 18, the convention, after another secession had taken place, nominated Mr. Douglas for President. The malcontents nominated John C. Breckinridge, then Vice-president of the United States, but soon to be guilty of treason to his country.

Mr. Douglas immediately took the stump, and throughout the campaign he labored with ceaseless energy, totally regardless of the limitations of his physical strength, his watchword being, Non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the Territories. In serving his party, he was no more scrupulous than the average politician, and his desire to be president was fatally strong, and yet he nobly dared to declare himself, above all, a patriot. Asked if Mr. Lincoln's election would justify the South in secession, he replied that if Lincoln should be elected, he, "as his firmest and strongest irreconcilable opponent," would sustain him in the exercise of every constitutional function; and this promise, made in the flush of anticipated success, was faithfully kept in the agony and humiliation of defeat. After the October elections had surely foreshadowed the victory of his opponent, he continued to address audiences nightly, and in the cities of the South he urged his hearers to stand by the Union in any event.

His defeat was overwhelming. Only one State, Missouri, gave him its entire electoral vote, and he received in all only twelve out of a total of three hundred and three votes. But in spite of his disappointment, he at once set to work to stem the rising tide of disunion, and the crowning glory of his life was his magnanimity in coming to the support of his successful rival in the hour of his country's danger. After the close of the extra session of the Senate in March, 1861, he returned to his Illinois home to rally his countrymen in defense of the Union. On the 25th of April he addressed the Illinois Legislature, upon the special request of the members of that body, although the Republicans were largely in the majority. A month later, his strength, which had been during the excitement of the campaign, largely sustained by stimulants, gave way under the intense strain, and on the 3rd of June, 1861, in the city of Chicago, he died, only forty-eight years old, his last coherent words expressing his love for his country and his detestation of her enemies. His second wife, to whom he was married in 1856, survived him.

[Source: Biographical Sketches of Preeminent Americans, Volume 3; By Frederick G. Harrison; Publ. 1893; Transcribed and submitted by Andrea Stawski Pack.]