he portrait is from a photograph by
Brady in the Library of the State
Department at Washington._

STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS

CHAPTER I

YOUTH AND THE WEST

The ten years of American history from 1850 to 1860 have a fascination
second only to that of the four years which followed. Indeed, unless one
has a taste for military science, it is a question whether the great war
itself is more absorbing than the great debate that led up to it;
whether even Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the March to the Sea, the
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 Republican party, the disruption and overthrow of the
long-dominant Democratic party,--through which the country came at last
to see that only the sword could make an end of the long controversy
between the North and the South.

The first years of the decade were marked by the passing of one group of
statesmen and the rise of another group. Calhoun's last speech in the
Senate was read at the beginning of the debate over those measures which
finally took shape as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was the
last instance of the leadership of Clay. The famous Seventh of March
speech in defense of it was Webster's last notable oration. These voices
stilled, many others took up the pregnant theme. Davis and Toombs and
Stephens and other well-trained Southern statesmen defended slavery
aggressively; Seward and Sumner and Chase insisted on a hearing for the
aggressive anti-slavery sentiment; 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
first in the minds of his contemporaries. A biographer writing now must
try to explain why he has been so lightly esteemed by that posterity to
whic