Stephen Douglas is not too popular in Illinois these days. Last year, the city added an ‘s’ to Douglass Park on the West Side, renaming it after abolitionist Frederick Douglass and his wife, Anna. In Springfield, then-House Speaker Michael Madigan ordered the removal of Douglas’s statue from the capitol grounds, and his portrait from the House chamber, where it had hung on the Democratic side for more than a century, across the aisle from Abraham Lincoln’s. Even Dick Durbin, who holds Douglas’s old Senate seat, tweeted “Removing Stephen Douglas’ statue from the main grounds of the State Capitol, and replacing it with Dr. Martin Luther King’s, is the right thing to do.”
Douglas’s offenses? He inherited a Mississippi plantation, and 100 slaves, from his wife. During his campaigns for the Senate and the presidency, he employed “abhorrent words towards people of color,” according to Madigan. (Yes, the worst one.)
Douglas is best remembered today as Lincoln’s foil in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, defending white supremacy and the right to own slaves, while Lincoln argued for racial equality and the right to free labor. That’s not inaccurate, but neither is it all of Douglas’s legacy, especially in Chicago. Douglas, who settled here after he was elected to the Senate in 1847, may have been the most important political figure in the city’s history.
As soon as Douglas arrived in Chicago, he began envisioning the city as the nation’s railroad hub, where the manufactured goods of the East would be exchanged for the foodstuffs of Western farmers—a marketplace uniting the commercial interests of the Atlantic Ocean, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and someday soon, he hoped, the Pacific. To further that vision, he passed the Illinois Central Railroad Tax Act, which created what was then the world’s longest rail line, stretching from Cairo, at the southern end of the state, to Galena, in its northwest extremity, with a spur connecting Chicago.
To Douglas, railroads were not simply a means of transportation, for conveying passengers and products. They bound together the Union, tie by tie, track by track—a Union essential for building Douglas’s Young America, a dynamic nation that would fill in all the lands from coast to coast. In the five years after the Illinois Central began running, the population of Chicago tripled, from 28,260 to 80,028. In the 1850s, the nation’s railroad mileage would also triple, from 9,000 to 30,000; 2,500 miles of those tracks were in Illinois, the decade’s fastest-growing state, since nearly every line west of Lake Michigan terminated in Chicago.
A young Illinois Central executive described the burgeoning city’s energy in a letter to his boss, in prose that prefigured Carl Sandburg’s poetic tribute: “There were about half a dozen locomotives flying about whistling, screaming, puffing, blowing, backing and going ahead, five or six hundred teams of every description loading and unloading; two or three or four… buildings going up skyward at the rate of a loft a day—hammers banging, tin rattling, chisels clinking and men swarming on what is the handsomest passenger station in the country – immense loads of round hogs coming over from neighboring depots and not less than 50 cars of live ones standing here and there on the track; merchandise of every description scattered around; emigrants crowding everywhere, passengers running about.”
(The Illinois Central was not just profitable for Chicago, it was profitable for Douglas, too: shortly after moving to the city, he began buying up lakefront property, sixteen acres of which he sold to the new railroad for $21,320.)
Once the railroad overtook the steamboat as the fastest method of transportation through the wilderness, Chicago replaced St. Louis as the Gateway to the West. St. Louis attempted to retain that title by promoting itself as the terminus of a transcontinental railroad, but Douglas argued that there should be a terminus in Chicago. Douglas’s argument prevailed—one reason Chicago, not St. Louis, is today the Midwest’s dominant city.
Douglas’s desire for a transcontinental railroad also inspired his greatest legislative fiasco, which has come to define his legacy more than the railroad itself. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Douglas authored and sponsored, is remembered as a scheme for opening the territories to slavery. In fact, it was Douglas’s scheme for overcoming Southern opposition to a railroad that would follow a Northern route to the Pacific—a route that would, of course, embark from Chicago, and run through Nebraska Territory, which had been designated as free soil by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Ever the hometown booster, Douglas acceded to Southern demands that he blow up the Missouri Compromise, and make it possible for Nebraska settlers, attracted by the railroad, to own slaves. Douglas had hoped to sweep aside the “slavery agitation” standing in the way of a railroad that would bring even more traffic to Chicago, and further bind together his beloved Union. Instead, the Act inflamed sectional controversies over slavery, and revived the political career of former one-term congressman Abraham Lincoln, whose 1854 speech at Peoria about slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act is a turning point in his career and the history of the country. Six years later, Lincoln would defeat Douglas in the presidential election.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act has been blamed for hastening the Civil War, and it’s certainly a stain on Douglas’s historic reputation. When the railroad was completed in 1869, though, it followed the northern route Douglas had championed. Between the pounding of the golden spike and the turn of the century, Chicago’s population increased five-fold.
Douglas died in 1861, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War. He is buried beneath a 96-foot-tall column on 35th Street, in the Douglas community area, which bears his name. Three local state representatives proposed tearing down the monument, while leaving Douglas’s grave intact, but so far, his tomb appears safe: it does not appear on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s list of 41 controversial monuments.
Douglas should be remembered as the quintessential Illinois politician: he was a dealmaker, not an idealist, willing to tolerate the expansion of slavery in exchange for advancing his adopted hometown’s economic prospects. As the father of the Illinois Central Railroad, and the founder of the state’s Democratic machine, he actually contributed far more to Illinois’s development and culture than Lincoln did. Douglas’s political machinations put him on the wrong side of history, though, which is why so many of his honors did not survive 2020’s reckoning over racial justice.
Stephen A. Douglas neither inherited nor owned slaves. When on the day after he married Martha Denny Martin of North Carolina his new father in law offered him a 3,000-acre plantation and 150 slaves in Mississippi. Douglas declined the gift. Robert Martin appreciated his new son-in-law’s principles and political circumstances, which also played in Douglas’s decision. Martin held his Mississippi slave property until his death on May 25, 1848.
In his “Last Will and Testament,” filed on November 23, 1847, in the Rockingham County Courthouse in North Carolina, Martin reminded his daughter “that her husband does not desire to own this kind of property.” He directed that “all my (Mississippi) lands and plantations . . .and all the Negroes I now own” convey directly to her under her “full and complete control.” (“ROBERT MARTIN Last Will & Testament, Rockingham County, NC, Will Book C, Pages 69-73)
Mississippi law at the time prohibited Douglas from any claim of ownership in his wife’s plantation or slaves. The law provided that any property of a married women, no matter how she acquired it, was hers exclusively and not subject to the control or disposal by her husband. (Allen Johnson, Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics. New York: MacMillan, 1908, 150.)
As Martin’s will ordered, when Martha Martin Douglas died on January 18, 1853, sons Robert Martin Douglas, 3, and Stephen Arnold Douglas Jr., 2, became sole heirs to the Mississippi slave properties. Under the same Mississippi law, Douglas now could manage the property for which he could derive up to 30 percent of the net proceeds. A Mississippi court in 1857 awarded Douglas guardianship of the sons to enable Douglas to sell the property and reinvest in a more productive Mississippi plantation. (Frank E. Stephens, “Stephen A. Douglas,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Springfield, 1924., 644-645)
Douglas never owned slaves.
Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln like him, used the vernacular of their day, which bespoke its racism and white supremacy. Lincoln argued the cause of white supremacy in Ottawa, Charleston, and Quincy in his 1858 debates with Douglas. (‘www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debates.htm). Douglas’s remarks at Charleston were similar. (Ibid) Both Lincoln and Douglas, agreed, however, that whatever inequality they might see in whites and blacks did not preclude the black from the rights and privileges to which he was entitled under the constitution. Douglas and Lincoln addressed that in their debate at Ottawa. (‘www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm)
Said Lincoln: “. . .In the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Said Douglas: “. . .I hold that humanity and Christianity both require that the negro shall have and enjoy every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety of the society in which he lives.” (Ibid)
Douglas’s was not a voice for slavery but a voice for the nation’s expansion. In that quest, he found slavery attached to every argument and every bill. His promise to those who elected him from Western Illinois in 1843 was that he would “build an ocean-bound republic” without red lines on a map. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., in December 1843 the youngest congressman in the new 28th Congress, only the states of Arkansas and Missouri had been organized west of the Mississippi River. Douglas’s vision of an ocean-bound republic would take in Texas and Oregon and after the Mexican-American War the 550,000-square-mile Mexican Cession. Organizing these territories for the nation would remove the red lines Douglas described that pointed to the interests of Britain, France, Mexico, and Spain on the continent.
Finally, Nebraska. One of Douglas’s first bills, H.R. 444, introduced on December 17, 1844, sought to organize the Nebraska territory. Over the next ten years, he tried again and again to bring in Nebraska. And each time, he sought to use the Missouri Compromise line to ameliorate the growing dissension over slavery—and it was always slavery—by extending it. Each attempt failed. Meanwhile, Douglas saw settlers in Oregon, which the federal government refused to organize, write a constitution to organize themselves—without slavery. It was for Douglas evidence that given the alternatives, settlers would choose freedom over slavery. They wrote freedom into their constitutions. There was more history for that. When his adopted state of Illinois tried to mount a constitutional convention in 1824 to make Illinois a slave state, Illinois voters rejected the idea by a ratio of 53 to 47. (Theodore Calvin Pease, Illinois Election Returns, 1818-1848. Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1923, 27)
Douglas came to see that the people of territories seeking organizations would always choose freedom over slavery. It happened. And continued to happen. He would see it not only in Oregon, but in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Others would follow. Douglas finally warned his southern colleagues that the settlement of the West would produce 17 new states. All of them, he warned, would come in free. (Congressional Glove, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 371.)
Douglas would not allow his southern colleagues to the North for the ultimate failure of slavery. In a rare revelation of sentiments for the man who, to compromise, held his bargaining chips close to the vest, Douglas in a debate on April 20, 1848, said, “In the North it is not expected that we should take the position that slavery is a positive good—a positive blessing. If we did assume such a position, it would be a very pertinent inquiry, why do you not adopt this institution? We have moulded our institutions at the North as we have thought proper; and now we say to you of the South, if slavery be a blessing, it is your blessing; if it be a curse, it is your curse; enjoy it—on you rest all the responsibility!” (Congressional Globe, 30th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 507)
Reg Ankrom, Author of “Stephen A. Douglas,: The Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1844” and “Stephen A. Douglas, Western Man: The Early Years in Congress, 1844-1850”
The first sentence of the last paragraph should read, “Douglas would not allow his southern colleagues to blame the North. . . .”
It’s all about hating and demonizing white men. Hateful anti-whites like Lori Lightfoot can spew their hatred openly, and retain power. It’s about denying white men equal protection under the law. It’s about denying white men educational and employment opportunities. It WILL NOT STOP until we fight back. Yes, you cowards. They will WIPE YOU OUT unless you fight back.