Stephen a douglas biography only
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More than most other antebellum politicians, Stephen Douglas is closely linked with “Bleeding Kansas” and the Missouri-Kansas “Border War.” A complex man, strongly partisan but committed to the Constitution as the ultimate law of the land, Douglas sponsored both the Compromise of and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of Unintentionally, while trying to prevent secession by pacifying the Southerners, Douglas’s compromises stoked more violence and helped push the United States over the brink and into Civil War.
The facts surrounding Douglas’s early years are foggy, due in part to the various versions of his childhood he issued himself. He was born in Brandon, Vermont, on April 23, His father was Stephen Arnold Douglass (The younger Stephen dropped the second “s” in his name in ). His mother was Sara “Sally” Fisk Douglass. Stephen’s father was a physician but died in when Stephen was three months old. Sara Douglas moved to her brother Edward’s farm, where Stephen lived for the next 17 years. Douglas described his uncle alternately as a hard man who refused to allow him to attend school more than three months a year and as a loving uncle whose duty to his own family prevented helping Stephen with his education. Eventually Douglas left home to apprentice to cabinetmaker Nathan Parker in Mid
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Early Life and Political Career
Born April 23, , in Brandon, Vermont, Douglas’s father, a doctor, died when he was a baby, and his mother moved the family to her brother’s nearby farm, and later to western New York, where he studied at the Canandaigua Academy and practiced debate. Apprenticing as a cabinetmaker as a teen, he was inspired by President Andrew Jackson’s election campaign and became a devoted follower of Jacksonian Democracy and its “era of the common man” ideals.
In New York, Douglas clerked at a law firm, then moved to Cleveland, where he continued to study law before moving to Illinois in , at age 20, where he worked as a schoolmaster before earning a law license in and setting up a law practice in Jacksonville, about 35 miles west of the state Capitol.
Did you know? After moving to Illinois in the s, Stephen A. Douglas briefly courted Mary Todd, who went on to marry his future rival, Abraham Lincoln.
In , Douglas was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, serving as a Democrat. He was appointed Illinois secretary of state during the legislative session and elected to serve as a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court in In , he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, a seat he held for three terms until From until his death in , he serve
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