Stephen A. Douglas: First Debate with Abraham Lincoln

About the Author

Stephen Arnold Douglas was born in Brandon, Vermont, in 1813. In his early years he lived in upstate New York, where his father practiced as a physician. Up to the age of fourteen, Douglas received an excellent education at the private Canandaigua Academy but was plunged into poverty by the death of his father. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker by his mother, who could not support him in any other way. As soon as he could, he moved west to find better opportunities, as so many Americans did throughout the nineteenth century, and settled in Illinois, which was then on the frontier.

Douglas spent the school year of 1833 to 1834 as a teacher while studying law; he was admitted to the bar the following summer and immediately began to practice law. He also set out on his political career, becoming a district attorney that same year (at age twenty-one). He traveled a meteoric course through the political ranks of the Illinois government, as a state legislator (1836), secretary of state (1840), and associate justice of the Illinois Supreme Court (1841). Then he moved on to Washington, D.C., first as a U.S. representative (1843) and next as senator (1847). (Senators at that time were elected by state legislatures.) Douglas was called the “Little Giant,” which referred to both his small stature (five feet, four inches) and his vast political abilities and influence. He seems to have had some natural instinct for politics. He was a master at reaching political compromise that both sides found advantageous, without ever revealing his own political agenda or revealing it only after the fact. To Douglas, impassioned political discourse that broadcast the speaker's feelings was a distasteful and self-indulgent display.

As a congressman, Douglas became chairman of the House Committee on the Territories and chair of the same committee in the Senate in 1847. At the time, this was the most powerful committee in Congress because it controlled the vast unorganized western territories that had entered the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), and the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain (1846), which included about two-thirds of the land area of the continental United States. It also controlled the future disposition of what was already one of the most contentious issues in America, the question of slavery. Douglas was to take the lead role in trying to resolve sectional rivalry between slave and free states in the Compromise of 1850 and finally through the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which meant letting each territory decide for itself, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

Douglas's great rival, Abraham Lincoln, represented a less compromising position on slavery, although, before the Civil War, even he did not envision doing more in the foreseeable future than limiting the spread of slavery outside the states where it already existed. Douglas won reelection to the Senate over Lincoln in 1859 precisely because he supported a compromise position that the Illinois legislature believed would not heighten already strained national tensions. However, Douglas's propensity for compromise threw the presidential election to Lincoln in 1860. Douglas managed to become the Democratic nominee, but his refusal to support a platform that forced slavery on all the territories (in line with the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in 1857) split the convention, with the result that southern Democrats ran the sitting vice president, John Breckinridge, as a second Democrat candidate. The split meant that Douglas carried electoral votes only from New Jersey and Missouri and that Lincoln was elected by a majority in the Electoral College, but with only 40 percent of the popular vote. Douglas lived until June 1861 but was repulsed by the extreme southern position that finally resulted in secession and the Civil War. In the end he supported Lincoln's decision to preserve the Union by military force.