Stephen A. Douglas 1813–1861

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.