Stephen Arnold Douglas - William Garrott Brown

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      From this time, Douglas and Lincoln knew each other well, for they lived together several years in an atmosphere of intimate personal scrutiny. For searching study of one's fellows, for utter disregard of all superficial criteria of character and conventional standards of conduct, there is but one sort of life to be compared with the life of a Southern or Western town, and that is the life of students in a boarding-school or a small college. In such communities there is little division into classes, as of rich and poor, educated and illiterate, well and obscurely born. On the steps of the court-house, in the post-office while the daily mail is sorted, in the corner 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 accounts of him he is represented as surrounded with intimates. Not without the power of impressing men with his dignity and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless hear of him sitting on the knee of an eminent judge during a recess of the court; dancing from end to end of a dinner-table with the volatile Shields – the same who won laurels in the Mexican War, a seat in the United States Senate, and the closest approach anybody ever won to victory in battle over Stonewall Jackson; and engaging, despite his height of five feet and his weight of a hundred pounds, in personal encounters with Stuart, Lincoln's athletic law partner, and a corpulent attorney named Francis.

      On equal terms he mingled in good-humored rivalry with a group of uncommonly resourceful men, and he passed them all in the race for advancement. There is some reason to believe that Lincoln, strange as it seems, was his successful rival in a love affair, but otherwise Douglas left Lincoln far behind. Buoyant, good-natured, never easily abashed, his maturity and savoir 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 a born leader, beyond question; and he himself does not seem ever to have doubted his fitness to lead, or ever to have agonized over the choice of a path and the responsibilities of leadership. Principles he had – the principles of Jefferson and Jackson as he understood them. These, apparently, he held sufficient for every problem and every emergency of political life.

      He believed in party organization quite as firmly as he believed in party principles, and in the summer of 1837 he had a hand in building up the machinery of conventions and committees through which the Illinois Democrats have governed themselves ever since. He defended Van Buren's plan of a sub-treasury when many even of those who had supported Jackson's financial measures wavered in the face of the disfavor into which hard times had brought the party in power, and in November, 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 every week without covering the whole of the great region they aspired to represent. The northern counties had been filling up with immigrants, and more than 36,000 votes were cast. Many ballots were thrown out on technicalities; most of the election officials were Whigs. After weeks of uncertainty, Stuart was declared elected by a majority of five. The moral effect, however, was a triumph for Douglas, who at the time of his nomination was not of the age required of congressmen.

      He announced that he would now devote himself to his profession. But it was by this time very difficult, even if he so wished, to withdraw from politics. He was constantly in council with the leaders of his party, and belonged to a sort of "third house" at Springfield which nowadays would probably be called a lobby. During the winter there was an angry controversy between the Democratic governor and the Whig senate over the question of the governor'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 meeting at Springfield, he defended the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, and when the presidential campaign opened in November he had a debate with Lincoln and other Whig orators. He was, in fact, the leading Democratic orator throughout the campaign in Illinois, and there is no doubt that his enthusiasm and his shrewdness had much to do with the result there. Of all the Northern States, only Illinois and New Hampshire went for Van Buren.

      Meanwhile, however, he had practiced law with such success that no account of the Illinois bar of those days omits his name from the list of eminent attorneys. It was noted that whereas Lincoln was never very successful save in those cases where his client's cause was just, a client with but a slender claim 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 affect the decision. Early in his experience as a lawyer he had to be content with fees that seem absurdly small; once, he rode from Springfield to Bloomington to argue a case, and got but five dollars for his services. But he was a first-rate man of business, and soon had a good income from his profession.

      In January, 1841, the legislature, now Democratic in both branches, removed the Whig incumbent from the office of secretary of state, and the governor at once appointed Douglas to succeed him. That office, however, he held less than a month, for the legislature had also reconstructed the supreme court in such a way as to increase the 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 unnaturalized inhabitants claiming the right to vote, and had thus established himself in the good-will of a large and increasing constituency throughout the State. Under the new law, each justice was assigned to a particular circuit, – Douglas to the westernmost, whose principal town was Quincy, on the Illinois River, where he made his home.

      The Mormon settlement of Nauvoo was in that circuit, and the most interesting of all the cases brought before Judge Douglas grew out of the troubles between the followers of Joe Smith and their neighbors. On one occasion, Joe Smith was himself on trial, and the Christian populace of the neighborhood, long incensed against him and his people, broke into the court-room clamoring for his life. The sheriff, a feeble-bodied and spiritless 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 longer a judge, but a major in a militia regiment sent on an expedition against Nauvoo, he was ordered to take a hundred men and arrest the "twelve apostles." The Mormons, outnumbering the militia, were fortified for defense. Major Douglas, however, proceeded alone into their lines, persuaded the twelve to enter their apostolic coach and come with him to the Christian camp, and so brought about an agreement which prevented a fight.

      Both as a judge and as a member of the council of revision Douglas stood out with commendable firmness against the popular feeling, strong throughout the country during the hard times, and which in some of the States got a complete 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

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