Stephen A. Douglas and a Nation of Law

IN 1834, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, A FIRST-TERM state representative, spotted Stephen A. Douglas in the State Capitol at Vandalia lobbying for a bill he wrote to change the way state's attorneys were appointed. Lincoln, a full foot taller than the 5′4″ Douglas, nudged seatmate John Todd Stuart and said, “That's the least man I ever saw.”1It was a rare moment after that incident that Lincoln disparaged the diminutive Douglas. By 1856, Lincoln would write of his political rival: “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even in foreign lands.”2 Douglas's rise in Illinois politics, unlike that of Lincoln, was meteoric: state's attorney, organizer and chairman of the statewide Democratic Party, state representative, secretary of state, and by age twenty-seven a justice of the Illinois supreme court, headquartered at Quincy.His work to shape the western half of the nation was Douglas's central contribution to the United States. He championed an “ocean-bound republic,” Atlantic to Pacific, and pledged to eliminate lines on the map that designated interests of France, Great Britain, and Spain in the continent.3For ten years, Northern fears of and Southern desires for slavery's expansion kept Texas out of the Union. Douglas proposed the way to bring it in: by a simple majority vote in Congress instead of by treaty, which would have required an impossible two-thirds vote in the Senate. Douglas's strategy on December 19, 1845, made Texas the Union's twenty-eighth state. It also made him leader of the expansionist Young America wing of the national Democratic Party.As chairman of House and Senate Committees on Territories, Douglas authored bills that framed the nation's westward expansion and internal improvements that would link the west to the Union. It was his great achievement, the Compromise of 1850, that annexed the 529,000 square miles of land Mexico ceded to the United States in 1848 after the American-Mexican War. When Henry Clay's eight-month effort failed to bring in the vast territory, Douglas took charge. Realizing how closely the South guarded its institution of slavery as well as a growing antagonism for it in the North, Douglas engineered the agreements that in six weeks won approval of the Compromise of 1850.During the Senate debates, Douglas warned the South that seventeen new states would be created from western territories. He predicted all would be free.4 History, Douglas said, demonstrated that if allowed to decide for themselves, the people would choose freedom over slavery. At the time the Constitution was ratified, he said, twelve of the thirteen states had slavery. By mid-century, seven had abolished it. The people, not the federal government, did that, Douglas argued.5 All the fuss in Congress, then, was abstraction. No federal law or congressional intervention—not the Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, or any kindred legislation—had stopped the existence or spread of slavery.6 Voters in California, Oregon, even his own state of Illinois, did that.It was Douglas's decade of experience in trying to pass territorial organization bills that made it easier for him in 1854 to agree to repeal the Missouri Compromise line. Congress had denied each of his proposals to extend the line for the annexations of Texas and Oregon, the Mexican Cession, and three of his five Nebraska Bills.7 Douglas told an Illinois State Fair crowd in October 1854 that it was Lincoln's own Whig Party that caused the failures of Douglas's proposal to extend the 36º30′ Missouri parallel.8Douglas argued that the Compromise of 1850 had replaced the Missouri Compromise with popular sovereignty. He was surprised at the backlash his Kansas-Nebraska law caused, the death of the Whig Party and the rise of the new Republican Party, the damage to Democratic strength in the Congress, and the violence of “Bleeding Kansas.”9A result was the near-win by the nascent Republican Party's first presidential candidate, western explorer John C. Fremont. Without a single electoral vote from the South, Fremont would have been elected the fifteenth president had he won Pennsylvania and Illinois’ thirty-seven electoral votes. With the North's population far outpacing the South's, Douglas foresaw that Republicans could win the Electoral College in 1860 without a single Southern vote.10 Southerners, too, recognized danger. In December 1856, radical slave owner William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama wrote, “We must then 1860 choose between submission and secession.”11In an exhaustive campaign throughout Illinois in 1858, Douglas retained his US Senate seat, but challenger Abraham Lincoln made his mark upon the nation. Their central theme was slavery, Douglas justifying it by the Constitution and saying popular sovereignty would resolve it, and Lincoln suggesting that no vote could make the wrong right.12On April 23, 1860, Douglas's forty-seventh birthday, Democrats convened in Charleston, South Carolina, to nominate their presidential candidate. Seven days and fifty-seven votes later, they adjourned, reconvened in Baltimore, and nominated Douglas. With Republicans sweeping Northern statewide elections, Douglas knew in August he would not win. He went south to campaign not for himself but for the Union.Meeting president-elect Lincoln in Washington, DC, on February 27, 1861, Douglas pledged to remain the loyal opposition but promised his support for Lincoln's efforts to reunite the dividing nation. Then he did as Lincoln asked. He returned to Springfield to call on patriots to defend the Union. “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors.”Exhausted by his campaign and saddened by a dividing nation, Douglas died in Chicago at 9:10 a.m. Monday, June 3, 1861. It was now up to one Illinoisan to preserve the nation his fellow Illinoisan had helped to build.