n essentially
local. As a stump-speaker in Whig canvasses outside of his State he had
attracted comparatively little attention; but in Illinois he had been
recognized as one of the foremost men of the Whig party. Among the
opponents of the Nebraska Bill he occupied in his State so important
a position, that in 1856 he was the choice of a large majority of the
"Anti-Nebraska men" in the Legislature for a seat in the Senate of the
United States which then became vacant; and when he, an old Whig, could
not obtain the votes of the Anti-Nebraska Democrats necessary to make
a majority, he generously urged his friends to transfer their votes
to Lyman Trumbull, who was then elected. Two years later, in the
first national convention of the Republican party, the delegation from
Illinois brought him forward as a candidate for the vice-presidency, and
he received respectable support. Still, the name of Abraham Lincoln was
not widely known beyond the boundaries of his own State. But now it was
this local prominence in Illinois that put him in a position of peculiar
advantage on the battlefield of national politics. In the assault on the
Missouri Compromise which broke down all legal barriers to the spread
of slavery Stephen Arnold Douglas was the ostensible leader and central
figure; and Douglas was a Senator from Illinois, Lincoln's State.
Douglas's national theatre of action was the Senate, but in his
constituency in Illinois were the roots of his official position and
power. What he did in the Senate he had to justify before the people
of Illinois, in order to maintain himself in place; and in Illinois all
eyes turned to Lincoln as Douglas's natural antagonist.

As very young men they had come to Illinois, Lincoln from Indiana,
Douglas from Vermont, and had grown up together in public life, Douglas
as a Democrat, Lincoln as a Whig. They had met first in Vandalia, in
1834, when Lincoln was in the Legislature and Douglas in the lobby; and
again in 1836, both as members of the Legislature. Douglas, a very able
politician, of the agile, combative, audacious, "pushing" sort, rose in
political distinction with remarkable rapidity. In quick succession he
became a member of the Legislature, a State's attorney, secretary
of state, a judge on the supreme bench of Illinois, three times a
Representative in Congress, and a Senator of the United States when only
thirty-nine years old. In the National Democratic convention of 1852 he
appeared e