At 9:10 am on Monday, June 3, 1861, Stephen A. Douglas died in Chicago at the age of forty-eight. Thus ended a remarkable life, both as a leader in the antebellum Democratic party and as a foil to Abraham Lincoln’s rise. Douglas had fallen ill weeks before while headed back to Illinois to lobby for Democratic support of the newly elected President Lincoln once the Civil War started. Lincoln immediately directs that government offices be close on the day of the funeral and that the Executive Mansion (aka, the White House) and departments be draped on mourning for thirty days. On June 4th, Secretary of War Simon Cameron issues a circular to Union armies, announcing “the death of a great statesman…a man who nobly discarded party for this country.”
Douglas’s legacy is a complicate one. He rose to great influence in the Senate, perhaps single-handedly pushing through passage of a series of bills that became known as the Compromise of 1850. He also pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which voided the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thus putting the United States on a path to ultimate civil war. He was a horrific racist, who used blatant racism as a tool to defeat Lincoln in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates during his Senate reelection campaign. He became the catalyst of the split between northern and southern Democrats in the 1860 election. As I wrote in Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America:
As expected, northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas. Because of Lincoln’s clever positioning on slavery during the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates—especially coaxing Douglas into the Freeport Doctrine—the Democratic Party had split into two factions, and Douglas represented only the North. Southern Democrats from the eleven slave states nominated their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge, the sitting Vice President under James Buchanan. To split the vote further, John Bell was nominated for a new Constitutional Union party, the main goal of which was that everyone just get along.
Lincoln again stayed in Springfield, as it was considered inappropriate for candidates to personally hit the campaign trail. Instead, Seward, Davis, and others made the case for him. Stephen A. Douglas, in contrast, campaigned extensively, spending a large amount of time in the South warning against disunion. Douglas race-baited as usual, insisting that government was “made by white men for white men” forever, but did try to convince southerners that they were better off working within the Union than trying to separate.
Because the Democratic Party had split, Republicans felt confident that Lincoln would win the election. Indeed, he won with about 40 percent of the popular vote and 180 of the 303 electoral votes available; 152 were needed to win. He won all the northern states plus the two new states of California and Oregon. John Breckinridge came in second, gaining 72 electoral votes from most of the southern slave states. Bell got 39 electoral votes by capturing the three border slave states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Douglas, once considered the likely winner, received only 12 electoral votes from the two states of Missouri and New Jersey. Lincoln was president-elect.
And yet, after the election, and after the Civil War began, it was Stephen A. Douglas who tried to rally the country to support Lincoln’s efforts to retain the Union. His life would come to an early end, but Douglas was a major influence – for good and for bad – on the antebellum nation. Douglas is buried in Chicago.
David J. Kent is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America. His newest Lincoln book is scheduled for release in February 2022. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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