The Little Giant

Stephen Arnold Douglas,
Mathew Brady Studio, between 1844 and 1860.
America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotypes, 1842-1862

U.S. congressman, senator, and presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas was born in Brandon, Vermont, on April 23, 1813. Short in stature but influential in Congress, Douglas was nicknamed the "Little Giant."

Douglas left New England at the age of twenty, settling in Illinois where he quickly established himself as a leader in the Democratic Party. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1843 and to the U.S. Senate in 1846, serving there until his death in 1861. A strong advocate of national expansion, he supported the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War.

In the 1850s, Douglas became a leader in the effort to negotiate the volatile issue regarding the spread of slavery into the territories. To this end, he supported the Compromise of 1850, which attempted to maintain the congressional balance between free and slave states, and, in 1854, sponsored the highly controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. This legislation removed from Congress the authority to exclude slavery from a territory, effectively repealing the congressional compromise achieved with the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and upheld with the Compromise of 1850.

James Buchanan, photographed between 1850 and 1870.
Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present

Douglas favored the use of popular elections over Congressional legislation to determine whether Kansas would be admitted as a slave or free state. This stance caused a breach between Douglas and President James Buchanan, although both were members of the same Democratic party. This difference was so strong that for a time Buchanan worked to block Douglas' reelection.

In the senate campaign of 1858, Republican hopeful Abraham Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of seven debates, known today as the Lincoln-Douglas debates. During these Douglas criticized Buchanan's opposition to his point-of-view almost as much as he debated Lincoln's. Although Douglas won the election of 1858, the national publicity accorded a lesser-known rival set the stage for Douglas' defeat in the presidential election of 1860.

For President Abrm Lincoln. For Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. 1860.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

• To find more material about the political issues that shaped Douglas' career, see the Today in History features on Henry Clay and John Calhoun.
• An important topic of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was slavery and the Dred Scott case. Search on the term Dred Scott in Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 to learn more from primary source documents of Douglas' time.
• Also see the 9 November 1857 letter from Justice Roger Brooke Taney to Caleb Cushing in which he discusses his decision in the Dred Scott case in Words & Deeds in American History.
• Search on the keywords Stephen Douglas or debate in the Abraham Lincoln Papers to learn more. Find, for example, Richard T. Merrick's telegram to Abraham Lincoln, reporting the death of Stephen Douglas.
• The online exhibition American Treasures consists of the rarest, most interesting, or significant items relating to U.S. history from the collections of the Library of Congress. Included are two items, a banner and a poster, from Lincoln's campaign against Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell for president.