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Stephen Arnold Douglas (né Douglass; April 23, 1813 – June 3, 1861) was an American politician and lawyer from Illinois.A U.S. Senator, he was one of two nominees of the badly split Democratic Party to run for president in the 1860 presidential election, which was won by Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.
Wood engraving illustrating the Charleston convention. The front-runner for the nomination was Douglas, who was considered a moderate on the slavery issue. With the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act, he advanced the doctrine of popular sovereignty: allowing settlers in each Territory to decide for themselves whether slavery would be allowed—a change from the flat prohibition of slavery in most ...
The Freeport Doctrine was articulated by Stephen A. Douglas on August 27, 1858, in Freeport, Illinois, at the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.Former one-term U.S. Representative Abraham Lincoln was campaigning to take Douglas's U.S. Senate seat by strongly opposing all attempts to expand the geographic area in which slavery was permitted.
Northern Democrats were in serious opposition to Southern Democrats on the issue of slavery; Northern Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, believed in Popular Sovereignty—letting the people of the territories vote on slavery. The Southern Democrats, reflecting the views of the late John C. Calhoun, insisted slavery was national.
In 1854, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—a key Democratic leader in the Senate—pushed the Kansas–Nebraska Act through Congress. President Franklin Pierce signed the bill into law in 1854. [3] [4] [5] The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to a decision by the residences on whether slavery would be legal or not. Previously ...
Stephen A. Douglas broke with the Democratic party leadership over the Lecompton Constitution. The Lecompton Constitution (1858) was the second of four proposed state constitutions of Kansas. Named for the city of Lecompton, Kansas where it was drafted, it was strongly pro-slavery. It never went into effect.
Douglas stated that while slavery may have been legally possible, the people of the state could refuse to pass laws favourable to slavery. In his famous "House Divided Speech" in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln stated: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
The term "popular sovereignty" was not coined by Douglas; in connection with slavery in the territories, it was first used by presidential candidate and Michigan senator Lewis Cass in his 1847 Nicholson Letter. [15] Today it is more closely associated with Douglas, and its connection to the failed attempt to accommodate slavery gave the term ...