50 to 1860 have a fascination second only

e Wilderness, Appomattox, are of more surpassing interest than the dramatic political changes,-the downfall of the Whig party, the swift rise and the equally swift submergence of the Know-Nothing party, the birth of the Rep

Cass and Buchanan maintained for a time their places as leaders in the school of compromise. But from the death of Clay to the presidential election of 1860 the most resonant voice of them all was the voice of Stephen Arnold Douglas. It is scarcely too much to say that during the whole period the centre of the stage was his, and his the most stirring part. In 1861, the curtain fell upon him still resolute, vigorous, commanding. When it rose again for another scene, he was gone so completely that nowadays it is hard for us to understand what a place he had. Three biographers writing near the time of his death were mainly concerned to explain how he came to be fir

or Arnold who was associated with Roger Williams in the founding of the colony. Sarah Fisk's mother was also an Arnold, and of the same family. Their son was therefore of good New England stock, and amply entitled to his middle name. Dr. Douglas died suddenly of apoplexy in July, 1813; it is said that he held the infant Stephen in his arms when he was stricken. His widow made her home with a bachelor brother on a farm near Br

e neighboring town of Middlebury, and apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker. He worked at cabinet-making two years, and afterwards, even when he had risen so high that many of his countrymen were willing he should try his hand at making cabinets of men, he pro

e had a way of making his fellows like him, so that they of their own accord put him forward, and that he had a lively interest in politics. It is said that even so early as the campaign of 1828, when he was but fifteen, he organized a band of his playmates to make war on the "coffin handbills" wherewith the Adams men sought to besmirch the military fame of General Jackson, already become his hero. At Canandaigua, four years later, he espoused the same cause in debating clubs, and won

veland he again turned westward, resolved in his own mind never to go back without the evidences of success in his life. It is doubtful if among all the thousands who in those days were constantly faring westward, from New England towns and the parishes of Virginia and the Carolinas, there ever was a youth more resolutely and boldly addressed to opportunity than he. Poor, broken in health, almost diminutive in physical stature, and quite unknown, he made his way first to Cincinnati, then to Louisville, then to St. Louis, in search of work. Coming almost to the end of his resources, he reasoned that it would be best for him to seek some country town,

chance in the talk about politics to display those qualities which he never failed to display when opportunity offered-the utmost readiness in debate, good-natured courtesy, and keen political instinct. A school was arranged for him, and within a week he had forty pupils entered for three months. A lawyer of the place befriended him with the loan of some books, and he gave his evenings to law and politics. When the three months were ended, he went back to Jacksonville and opened an office. March 4, 1834, he was licensed to practice, and from that time he rose faster than any

the State. A few years earlier, that whole region had been a frontier, but the first roughness was now worn away. True, the whole northern half of Illinois was practically unsettled, and Chicago was but three years old, and not yet important. But it appears that the general character of the central counties was already fixed, and what followed was of the nature of growth rather than change. Certain small towns, like Springfield, were to become cities, and certain others, like New S

e found to deal with internal improvements, particularly railroads and canals. Money, however, was needed for these things, and Illinois, like all new countries, had to look backward to older communities for capital. President Jackson had but lately made his final assault upon the National Bank, the principal dispenser of capital, by the removal of the deposits, and public opinion was much divided on his course, when Douglas opened his law

Southern custom, the country people flocked into town, that he was put forward to move the Jackson resolutions at a mass meeting of Democrats which he and his friend, the editor, had contrived to bring about. There was a great crowd. Josiah Lamborn, an orator of some reputation, opposed the resolutions. Douglas replied in an hour's speech, discomfited Lambo

e was chosen by the legislature, and not by his neighbors of the circuit. Moreover, his competitor, John J. Hardin, was one of the foremost men of Illinois. It is true that Hardin was a Whig, and that by this time there was a pretty clear division between

Democrats of Morgan held a convention to nominate candidates for the six seats in the house of representatives to which the county was entitled. This was a novel proceeding, for the system of conventions to nominate for office was not yet developed; the first of the national party conventions was held in preparation for the presidential campaign of 1832. Douglas was a leader in the movement, and as a result of it he himself was drawn into the contest. Morgan was a Whig county, but the solid front of the Democracy so alarmed the Whigs that they also abandoned the old plan of lettin

body, for his habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet taller. Douglas, many years later,

tate ought to attempt no improvement which it could not afford to construct and to own. He favored a few specific enterprises and the making of careful surveys and estimates before any others should be taken up. But it was the very height of "flush times" in Illinois, and the legislature added millions to the vast sums in which the State was already committed to the support of canals, railroads, river improvements, and banks. It was but a few weeks from the adjournment in March to the great financial panic of 1837, which crushed every one of the state-aided banks, stopped the railroad building and river dredging, and finally left I

er drug store on Sundays, in lawyers' offices, on the curbstone,-wherever a group of men is assembled,-there is the freest talk on every possible subject; and the lives of men are open to their fellows as they cannot be in cities by reason of the mass or in country districts by reason of the solitude and the shyness which solitude breeds. Against Douglas there was the presumption, which every New England man who goes southward or westward has to live down, that he would in some measure hold himself aloof from his fellows. But the prejudice was quickly dispelled. No man entered more readily into close personal relations with whomsoever he encountered. In all our a

ir faire were accentuated by the smallness of his stature. His blue eyes and his dark, abundant hair heightened his physical charm of boyishness; his virile movements, his face, heavy-browed, round, and strong, and his well-formed, uncommonly large head gave him an aspect of intellectual power. He had a truly Napoleonic trick of attaching men to his fortunes. He was

, although the Springfield congressional district, even before the panic, had shown a Whig majority of 3000, he accepted the Democratic nomination for the seat in Congress to be filled at the election in August, 1838, and threw himself with the utmost ardor into the canvass. The district was the largest in the whole country, for it included all the northern counties of the State. His opponent was John T. Stuart, Lincoln's law partner, and for five months the two spoke six days

rnor's right to appoint a secretary of state, the senate refusing to confirm his nomination of McClernand on the ground that the office was not vacant. The question was brought before the supreme court, whose Whig majority, by deciding against the governor, strengthened a growing feeling of discontent with the whole judiciary among the Democrats, and Douglas took strong ground in favor of reorganizing the court. In March, addressing a great mee

upon the court's favor found Douglas a far better advocate. He never seems to have given much time to the reading of law or to the ordinary drudgery of preparing cases for trial, but he mastered the main facts of his cases with the utmost facility, and his mind went at once to the points that were sure to

number of judges, and in February, being then less than twenty-eight years old, he was named for one of the new places. One of the reasons why the court was reconstructed was its opposition to the Democratic position on the franchise question. Douglas, arguing a famous franchise case before it, had made himself the champion of unnat

ritless official, showed signs of yielding, and the judge, promptly assuming a power not vested in his office, appointed a stalwart Kentuckian sheriff, and ordered him to summon a posse and clear the room. By these means the defendant's life was saved, and Douglas, notwithstanding various decisions of his against them, earned the gratitude of the religious enthusiasts. There is a story that some years later, when he was no lon

te ascendency over courts and legislatures, in favor of the relief of debtors. He enforced the old laws for the collection of debts, and he baulked several legislative schemes to defraud creditors of their due by declaring the ne

s senator, his name was presented, though again his age fell short of the legal requirement, and on the last ballot he had fifty-one votes against the fifty-six which elected his successful competitor. The next year, being nominated for the lower house

ices, he had risen to high rank in his profession, he was the leader of the dominant party in a great State; and all this he had done alone, unaided. Few aged men have brought back such laurels from their Western fortune-see