e sensitive
face rather of a poet than of a man of affairs, vivid, sincere and
careful of honour, though often uncertain in temper and judgment:
Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. But for the moment none of these so
dominated politics as did the Westerner whom Illinois had recently sent
to the Senate--Stephen Douglas, surnamed "the Little Giant."

The physical impression which men seem to have received most forcibly
concerning Douglas, and which was perhaps responsible for his nickname,
was the contrast between his diminutive stature and the enormous power
of his voice--trained no doubt in addressing the monster meetings of the
West, where tens of thousands crowded everywhere to hear him speak.
Along with this went the sense of an overwhelming vitality about the
man; he seemed tingling with excess of life. His strong, square,
handsome face bore a striking resemblance to that of Napoleon Bonaparte,
and there was really something Napoleonic in his boldness, his
instinctive sense of leadership, and his power of dominating weaker men.
Withal he was a Westerner--perhaps the most typical and complete
Westerner in American history, for half of Clay was of Washington, and
Jackson and Lincoln were too great to be purely sectional. He had a
Westerner's democratic feeling and a Westerner's enthusiasm for the
national idea. But, especially, he had a peculiarly Western vision which
is the key to a strangely misunderstood but at bottom very consistent
political career.

This man, more than any other, fills American history during the decade
that intervened between the death of Clay and the election of Lincoln.
That decade is also full of the ever-increasing prominence of the
Slavery Question. It is natural, therefore, to read Douglas's career in
terms of that question, and historians, doing so, have been bewildered
by its apparent inconsistency. Unable to trace any connecting principle
in his changes of front, they have put them down to interested motives,
and then equally unable to show that he himself had anything to gain
from them, have been forced to attribute them to mere caprice. The fact
is that Douglas cannot be understood along those lines at all. To
understand him one must remember that he was indifferent on the Slavery
Question, "did not care," as he said, "whether Slavery was voted up or
voted down," but cared immensely for something else. That something else
was the Westward expansion of the American nation till it should