and the chief promoter (1850) of the Illinois Central; in 1854 he suggested that Congress should impose tonnage duties from which towns and cities might themselves pay for harbour improvement, &c. To him as chairman of the committee on territories, at first in the House, and then in the Senate, of which he became a member in December 1847, it fell to introduce the bills for admitting Texas, Florida, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Oregon into the Union, and for organizing the territories of Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, Kansas and Nebraska. In 1848 he introduced a bill proposing that all the territory acquired from Mexico should be admitted into the Union as a single state, and upon the defeat of this bill proposed others providing for the immediate admission of parts of this territory.
In the bitter debates concerning the keenly disputed question of the permission of slavery in the territories, Douglas was particularly prominent. Against slavery itself he seems never to have had any moral antipathy; he married (1847) the daughter[1] of a slaveholder, Colonel Robert Martin of North Carolina, and a cousin of Douglas’s colleague in Congress, D. S. Reid; and his wife and children were by inheritance the owners of slaves, though he himself never was. He did more probably than any other one man, except Henry Clay, to secure the adoption of the Compromise Measures of 1850. In 1849 the Illinois legislature demanded that its representatives and senators should vote for the prohibition of slavery in the Mexican cession, but next year this sentiment in Illinois had grown much weaker, and, both there and in Congress, Douglas’s name was soon to become identified with the so-called “popular sovereignty” or “squatter sovereignty” theory, previously enunciated by Lewis Cass, by which each territory was to be left to decide for itself whether it should or should not have slavery. In 1850 his power of specious argument won back to him his Chicago constituents who had violently attacked him for not opposing the Fugitive Slave Law.
The bill for organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which Douglas reported in January 1854 and which in amended form was signed by the president on the 30th of May, reopened the whole slavery dispute—wantonly, his enemies charged, for the purpose of securing Southern support,—and caused great popular excitement, as it repealed the Missouri Compromise, and declared the people of “any state or territory” “free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” The passage of this Kansas-Nebraska Bill, one of the most momentous in its consequences ever passed by the Federal Congress, was largely a personal triumph for Douglas, who showed marvellous energy, adroitness and resourcefulness, and a genius for leadership. There was great indignation throughout the free states; and even in Chicago Douglas was unable to win for himself a hearing before a public meeting. In 1852, and again in 1856, he was a candidate for the presidential nomination in the national Democratic convention, and though on both occasions he was unsuccessful, he received strong support. In 1857 he broke with President Buchanan and the “administration” Democrats and lost much of his prestige in the South, but partially restored himself to favour in the North, and especially in Illinois, by his vigorous opposition to the method of voting on the Lecompton constitution, which he maintained to be fraudulent, and (in 1858) 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 senatorship with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, whom he met in a series of debates (at Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton), in one of which, that at Freeport, Douglas was led to declare that any territory, by “unfriendly legislation,” could exclude slavery, no matter what the action of the Supreme Court. This, the famous “Freeport Doctrine,” lost to Douglas the support of a large element of his party in the South, and in Illinois his followers did not poll so large a vote as Lincoln’s. Douglas, however, won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54 to 46. In the Senate he was not reappointed chairman of the committee on territories. In 1860 in the Democratic national convention in Charleston the adoption of Douglas’s platform brought about the withdrawal from the convention of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Arkansas. The convention adjourned to Baltimore, 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, he received an electoral vote of only 12—Lincoln receiving 180. Douglas urged the South to acquiesce in Lincoln’s election. On 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 the North-west to rouse the spirit of Unionism; he spoke in West Virginia, Ohio and Illinois. He died on the 3rd of June 1861 at Chicago, where he was buried on the shore of Lake Michigan; the site was afterwards bought by the state, and an imposing monument with a statue by Leonard Volk now stands over his grave.
In person Douglas was conspicuously small, being hardly five feet in height, but his large head and massive chest and shoulders gave him the popular sobriquet “The Little Giant.” His voice was strong and carried far, he had little grace of delivery, and his gestures were often violent. As a resourceful political leader, and an adroit, ready, skilful tactician in debate, he has had few equals in American history.
See Allen Johnson’s Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics (New York, 1908), W. G. Brown’s Stephen Arnold Douglas (Boston, 1902), and an excellent review of his later life in James Ford Rhodes’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1893–1906); also P. O. Ray, Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (Cleveland, Ohio, 1909), and E. C. Carr, Stephen A. Douglas (Chicago, 1909).
DOUGLAS, the capital of the Isle of Man, a municipal borough and a favourite watering-place. Pop. (1901) 19,223. It stands on a fine semicircular bay on the east coast of the island, at the common mouth of two streams, the Awin-Dhoo and Awin-Glass, 62 m. W.N.W. of Fleetwood and 80 m. N.W. of Liverpool. The older streets are irregular and narrow, but the town has greatly extended in modern times, with numerous terraces of good dwelling-houses. A fine parade sweeps round the bay, which, from Derby Castle on the north to Douglas Head on the south, has a circuit exceeding 2 m. Low hills, penetrated by the valleys of the Dhoo and Glass, encircle the town on the north, west and south, the southern spur projecting seaward in the promontory of Douglas Head. The harbour, in the river mouth, lies immediately north of this; vessels drawing 9 ft. may enter it during neap tides, and those drawing 13ft. during spring tides. A castellated building, called the Tower of Refuge, erected in 1832, marks the dangerous Conister rocks, north of the harbour entrance. The Battery pier protects the entrance on the south-west, and there is a short pier (the Red pier) within the harbour, while the Victoria pier on the north, at which passengers can land and embark at all heights of the tide, was erected in 1872. There is regular daily communication with Liverpool by the steamers of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, and during the season there are connexions with Fleetwood, Barrow, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. Douglas is connected by electric tramway northward with Laxey, the summit of the mountain of Snaefell and Ramsey, and southward with Port Soderick, while the Isle of Man railway runs to Peel in the west, and Castletown and Port Erin in the south-west. The town has services of cable and horse trams. The various popular attractions of Douglas include theatres, dancing halls, a race-course and two golf links Howstrake and Quarter Bridge. The shore of the bay is of firm
- ↑ Her death in 1853 was a great blow to him and embittered him. in November 1856 he married Adèle Cutts, a Maryland belle, a grand-niece of Dolly Madison, and a Roman Catholic, who became the leader of Washington society, especially in the winter of 1857–1858, when Douglas was in revolt against Buchanan.
