Stephen Douglas, nicknamed the "Little Giant," was an American politician from the western state of Illinois and was the Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860. He lost to Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln.
As a brilliant party leader and an adroit, ready, skillful tactician in debate and passage of legislation, he shaped the Third Party System by taking leadership of the Democratic party away from pro-Southern men like President James Buchanan and committing it to the basic principle of democracy, "Let the People Rule!"
As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Douglas dominated the Senate in the 1850s and shaped most of the debates over slavery.
He was largely responsible for the Compromise of 1850, which apparently settled slavery issues.
However, in 1854, he reopened the slavery question with the highly controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the people of the new territories to decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery. The protest movement against this became the Republican Party.
Douglas supported the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 and denied that it was part of a Southern plot to introduce slavery in the Northern states, but also argued it could not be effective when the people of a Territory declined to pass laws supporting it.
When President Buchanan and his Southern allies attempted to pass a federal slave code to support slavery, even against the wishes of the people of Kansas, he battled and defeated this movement as undemocratic.
This caused the split in the Democratic Party in 1860, as Douglas won the nomination, but a breakaway southern faction nominated their own candidate.
Douglas deeply believed in democracy, arguing the will of the people should always be decisive.
When war came in April 1861, he rallied his supporters to the Union with all his energies, but he died a few weeks later.
Early career
A Yankee born in Brandon, Vermont, Douglas came to Illinois in 1833 at age 20, was an itinerant teacher, studied law, and settled in Jacksonville, Illinois.
By the end of one 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 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.
Henry Clay chiefly designed the Compromise of 1850, but the Omnibus Bill containing it did not pass Congress.
Each point separately had majority support, but Northerners and Southerners combined to vote the bill down for their own reasons.
Douglas passed the Compromise by dividing it into separate bills and arranging a different majority for each. 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.
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.
Personal Life and Family
In-person, Douglas was conspicuously short (at 5 foot 4 inches and 90 pounds), 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.
Douglas moved to a farm near Clifton Springs, N.Y., and studied at Canandaigua Academy from 1832 to 33. He then moved to Illinois as an itinerant teacher and soon rose in Democratic party politics. Douglas briefly courted Mary Todd.
He married Martha Martin in March of 1847, the daughter of wealthy Colonel Robert Martin of North Carolina.
She brought to Douglas 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 a 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. The newlyweds moved their Illinois home to fast-growing Chicago in the summer of 1847.
Martha Douglas died on January 19, 1853, leaving the Senator with two small sons.
On November 20, 1856, he married 20-year-old Adele Cutts, the daughter of James Madison Cutts and a great-niece of Dolley Madison
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Douglas set off a tremendous political upheaval by proposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.
New laws were needed to allow for the settlement of the Nebraska territory. Douglas had invested in Chicago land, which would be made more valuable by railroads from Chicago that would serve the region, as it had been by the Illinois Central.
The Compromise of 1820 guaranteed slavery would not exist there, and the Compromise of 1850 reaffirmed this.
Leading Southern Senators had met with Douglas and had insisted on popular sovereignty as a condition for their support of the bill, and Douglas's first bill had only enacted it to a limited extent by providing that Nebraska and Kansas could enter the Union free or slave as the residents might decide; but the Southerners insisted, and Douglas discovered a "clerical error," and revised the bill.
Douglas argued that the people of the territory should decide the slavery question by themselves and that soil and climate made the territory unsuitable for plantations; which last reassured his northern supporters it would remain free.
Douglas defended his doctrine of popular sovereignty as a means of promoting democracy and removing the slavery issue from national politics, lest it threatens to rip the nation apart, but it had exactly the opposite effect.
The act was passed by Southern votes, Democratic and Whig alike, and Douglas had little to do with the final text.
This was the first appearance of the Solid South, and the opponents of the Act saw it as the triumph of the hated Slave Power and formed the Republican Party to stop it.
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. 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 to the admission of Kansas into the Union under this constitution.
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 United States 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. Lincoln pointedly denied Douglas' assertion that the Declaration of Independence did not include minorities.
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 the equality of all citizens (only whites were citizens), in which individual merit and social mobility were not the main goals.
Douglas won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54 to 46, but the debates helped boost Lincoln into the presidency.
Douglas waged a furious battle with President James Buchanan for control of the Democratic party. Although Douglas was not reappointed chairman of the Senate committee on territories, he bested Buchanan throughout the North and headed into 1860 as the front-running candidate for president.[16]
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 received 180.
His support in the North came from the Irish Catholics and the poorer farmers; in the South, the Irish Catholics were his main supporters.
Douglas urged the South to acquiesce to Lincoln's election and made efforts to arrange a compromise that would persuade the South to remain in the Union.
At the outbreak of the 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.
Douglas died from typhoid fever on June 3, 1861, in Chicago, where he was buried on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The site was afterward bought by the state, and an imposing monument with a statue by Leonard Volk now stands over his grave.