Stephen A. Douglas

Stephen Douglas stood five feet four inches tall and carried himself like a man who never noticed. The "Little Giant" of Illinois politics was the most powerful Democrat in Congress through the 1850s — a Senator who helped push through the Compromise of 1850 and then, in 1854, detonated the uneasy peace he had helped construct with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. By repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the question of slavery's expansion to a vote of settlers in each territory, he ignited the decade of crisis that ended in civil war.

Douglas believed in "popular sovereignty" — the principle that settlers, not Congress, should decide whether to permit slavery in new territories. He saw it as a practical democratic solution that might hold the fractured Union together. What it produced instead was "Bleeding Kansas," a violent rehearsal for the Civil War fought between pro-slavery and free-state settlers pouring across the territory's borders. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, seven exchanges held across Illinois Senate districts, forced both men to sharpen the arguments that would define the coming conflict. Douglas won that Senate seat. Lincoln won the presidency two years later.

Douglas received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860 — the Northern faction's nominee after the party shattered along sectional lines — and understood, more clearly than most, what Lincoln's victory would trigger. After the election, he spent his remaining months touring the country and pleading for the Union with an urgency that surprised those who had seen him as a trimmer. He died of typhoid fever in June 1861 at 48, before the war he had done so much to precipitate had run half its course.