Guide to the Stephen A. Douglas Papers 1764-1908
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University of Chicago Library Guide to the Stephen A. Douglas Papers 1764-1908 © 2014 University of Chicago Library Table of Contents Descriptive Summary 3 Information on Use 3 Access 3 Citation 3 Biographical Note 3 Scope Note 7 Related Resources 9 Subject Headings 9 INVENTORY 9 Series I: Senate and Constituent Correspondence 9 Series II: Political 484 Subseries 1: Correspondence 484 Subseries 2: Campaigns 487 Subseries 3: Commerce and Internal Improvements 490 Subseries 4: Foreign Affairs 494 Subseries 5: Military Affairs 497 Subseries 6: Secession 499 Subseries 7: Slavery 500 Subseries 8: Territories 503 Subseries 9: General 514 Series III: Personal 516 Subseries 1: Autobiography 516 Subseries 2: Correspondence 517 Subseries 3: Travel 523 Subseries 4: Death and Estate 526 Subseries 5: General 529 Series IV: Financial and Legal 532 Subseries 1: Correspondence 532 Subseries 2: Financial 536 Subseries 3: Legal 553 Series V: Artifacts and Ephemera 555 Series VI: Oversize 556 Series VII: Books 569 Descriptive Summary Identifier ICU.SPCL.DOUGLASSA Title Douglas, Stephen A. Papers Date 1764-1908 Size 42.5 linear ft. (65 boxes) Repository Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A. Abstract Stephen A. Douglas, lawyer, judge, politician. The Stephen A. Douglas papers document his professional and personal life from 1764-1908. The collection includes correspondence, speeches, reports, memoranda, notes, financial and legal documents, portraits, maps, ephemera, newspaper clippings, and artifacts. The largest portion of the collection consists of Senate and Constituent correspondence. Information on Use Access This collection is open for research. Citation When quoting material from this collection, the preferred citation is: Stephen A. Douglas. Papers, [Box #, Folder #], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library Biographical Note Stephen Arnold Douglass was born in Brandon, Vermont, on April 23, 1813. His father, physician Stephen Arnold Douglass, died when the baby was only two months old. His mother, Sarah Fiske Douglass, remarried to Gehazi Granger. In 1830, the Granger family moved from Vermont to upstate New York, where after a brief period at an academy Stephen Douglass began to read law under a locally prominent Democratic attorney. In 1833, Stephen made his way west to seek his career and fortune. After arriving in Quincy, Illinois, and operating a private school for a time, he secured a law license and set up practice in Jacksonville, Illinois. As he established the basis for a professional career, Stephen also changed the spelling of his last name from Douglass to Douglas. Stephen A. Douglas first became politically known in Illinois as a staunch Democratic proponent of President Andrew Jackson. Between 1835 and 1840, Douglas held a succession of Illinois 3 state offices, some of them concurrently, including state’s attorney, state legislator, register of the Springfield land office, and secretary of state. In 1841, at the age of twenty-seven, he was elected to a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court. In 1836, he lost a disputed race for the U.S. House of Representatives by thirty-six popular votes. Four years later he lost a campaign for a U.S. Senate seat by five legislative votes. Only in 1843, running in a newly created congressional district, was Douglas able to win a seat in the House. As a member of the House of Representatives, Douglas was among those urging an extension of United States territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He called for the annexation of Texas, the establishment of military posts along the Western emigrant trails, and organization of a Nebraska territorial government. By 1845, these and other strong expansionist positions had won Douglas the chairmanship of the House Committee on Territories. Through a congressional colleague, Douglas met Martha Denny Martin (1825-1853), the daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter and a member of a family long prominent in North Carolina political affairs. When Stephen and Martha were married in 1847, Robert Martin offered his new son-in-law his 2,500-acre plantation on the Pearl River in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Douglas declined the gift, but after Martin died a year later, the Pearl River plantation was bequeathed to Martha and any children she might have. Douglas was designated as the property manager and was allocated 20 per cent of the plantation’s annual income for his services. Two children born to their marriage survived into adulthood, Robert Martin Douglas (1849-1917) and Stephen Arnold Douglas, Jr. (1850-1908). In 1847, after only three years in the House of Representatives, Douglas was elected by the Illinois state legislature to a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he was made chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. His position gave him an influential role in shaping all aspects of national policy affecting western lands, from the courts and post office to military posts and legislative powers. He also became quickly immersed in growing sectional disputes over the future of slavery. As a Senator from a state with a mix of strong anti-slavery and pro-slavery sentiment, and as the manager of a Mississippi plantation with more than 100 slaves, Douglas attempted to craft a political position that would avoid favoring either the North or South. The first significant test of this policy, the Compromise of 1850, is usually credited to Henry Clay, but it owed a great deal to Douglas' political skills. To satisfy the North, California was admitted as a free state, and the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia; to reassure the South, the territories of New Mexico and Utah were organized without a prohibition of slavery, and a rigid fugitive slave law was enacted. Despite this careful attempt to placate both sides in the slavery controversy, the reaction to the Compromise in the North was immediate and hostile. Douglas came under fierce attack in his home state and was able to calm his supporters only by rushing back to Illinois to defend himself before the Chicago city council and the state legislature. 4 In 1853, Douglas sustained a grave personal loss when his wife Martha died following complications from the birth of a daughter. After their infant girl also died a few weeks later, a grieving Douglas decided to leave the country for an extended tour of Europe. His travels took him to London, Constantinople, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Paris, in the course of which he secured a number of diplomatic audiences and met Czar Nicholas I and Emperor Napoleon III. Douglas' personal life did not recover its equilibrium until 1856, when he married twenty-one- year-old Rose Adele Cutts (1835-1899), known as Adele, whose father, James Madison Cutts, was a nephew of President James Madison and Dolley Madison. The new Mrs. Douglas accepted Douglas' two sons as her own and raised them with his approval in her own Catholic faith. Their infant daughter Ellen died shortly after birth in 1859. The Douglases built an imposing townhouse in Washington just north of Capitol Hill, and it soon became renowned for lavish parties and receptions. Douglas' personal affairs also changed in other respects. In 1857, Douglas sold the family plantation on the Pearl River, which had been affected by flooding and poor crops, and in partnership with James A. McHatton of Baton Rouge, moved the agricultural operation to a 2,000-acre property south of Greenville, Mississippi. Throughout his career, Douglas maintained a strong interest in science, education, and technological improvements. In 1850, Douglas secured the passage of federal legislation supporting the Illinois Central Railroad route from Chicago down the Mississippi Valley to New Orleans, thus helping to make Chicago and Illinois a national center for industry and commerce. Douglas was an enthusiastic supporter of the Smithsonian Institution from the time of its founding and in 1854 was appointed a regent of the Smithsonian. In 1858 Douglas gave ten acres on the south side of Chicago to serve as the site of the newly organized University of Chicago; the land was part of his Oakenwald estate, where Douglas planned to develop an exclusive suburban neighborhood and erect his own residence. Douglas' rising prominence in national affairs reached a crest in January 1854, when he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill to organize governments in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. In each territory, the question of slavery would be reserved until it entered the Union as a new state; at that time, the voting citizens would draw up a constitution and determine whether or not their state would permit slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska bill embodied Douglas' doctrine of popular sovereignty, according to which the voters in newly admitted states, not the federal government, would determine the future of slavery by exercising their democratic rights to self-government. Douglas also hoped that popular sovereignty would remove slavery from congressional debate and insulate the federal government from further sectional conflict. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, unleashed a new torrent of angry protest by Northern anti- slavery forces, who felt it opened the door to an expansion of slavery across the West. Douglas returned to Illinois to defend his position, touring the state for two months and twice trading opposing speeches with Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig legislator and congressman who reemerged on the political stage and became a spokesman for the new Republican Party. 5 In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas also found himself at odds with important elements of the national Democratic party. He had first attempted to gain the Democratic nomination for president in 1852. In 1856, he tried once again for the presidential nomination, but withdrew his name in favor of James Buchanan, who went on to win the election.