***“Young America”- The Stephen A, Douglas Story (Yah, The Guy That Debated Lincoln Way Back When)

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Stephen A. Douglas: Defender Of The Union, Gerald M. Capers, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1959

At a time when we are deep into commemorating the 150^thanniversary of the American Civil War (yes I know the sesquicentennial but who knows that word now so 150^th okay) my recent reading interest has been on some of the outstanding figures from that period. Not the obvious big name figures who, one way or the other drove the political or military action, like John Brown, Lincoln, Seward and Davis or Grant and Lee but other figures important to understanding how the conflict, in the final analysis, as Seward (and others pointed out) was irrepressible. That led me to and old time biography (1959 old, old by the furious standard of revisionist biography) by Professor Caper done at a time when the 100^th anniversary (okay, okay centennial) of the war was approaching.

Now Douglas died near the beginning of the war and so his effect on the outcome was small but as the leading advocate for the theory of popular sovereignty that swirled around in the decade before the war he was certainly an influential figure in the political struggle to do something, something seemingly benign in his case, to avoid the war that he also knew was coming, and that would be, as it turned out, be bloody hell. Although he is popularly known, if now known at all, as Lincoln’ s punching bag (okay nemesis) during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign debates he actually was a more powerful figure than Lincoln and his fledgling Republican Party (to speak nothing of the moribund Whigs and Know-Nothings of unblessed memory) during this period. Moreover Dougal was a central power, and perennial presidential candidate, in the northern wing of the Democratic Party and it was thus no accident that Professor Caper’ s wrote his biography at that time.

The figure of Abraham Lincoln has been subjected to many periodic revisions, most recently around whether he was just another redneck racist who just so happened to see that if the union was to be preserved and to prosper that damn slavery had to go. That swirling teacup controversy got me thinking about how Douglas’ reputation would stand up today since even under Professor Caper’s sympathetic story line Douglas was not a friend of black people, no serious opponent of slavery except as it affected the preservation of the union, and was prepared to sees its extension under the terms of his popular sovereignty doctrine to any place that it could thrive. So a biographer writing today would almost be honor bound to create a more critical study. In short, among the various revisionist trends today, Lincoln should not, could not, be the only white man to take a serious posthumous beating by historians on the question of racial attitudes.

Strangely the figure of Douglas, a poor boy from the sticks who made good in Chicago real estate and other ventures and had a “fire within” desire to be an important political figure, to be president, like Lincoln was perfect example of that Western (then western) ethos that sprang up in this country from about Andrew Jackson’s time. That bootstrap ethos formed the core of the “Young America” movement, a movement that was part of a larger international movement of the times, which inhaled the nationalist spirit and heralded the rise of the capitalist ethos as the way forward for America. Douglas’ popular sovereignty doctrine where under its terms each new state (or territory) would determine in its own way whether slavery was to be permitted in its jurisdiction fed right into that spirit. Of course Douglas paid a heavy political price, the split, north and south, and of his beloved Democratic Party which would howl in the wilderness for most of the rest of the 19^th century and the effective thwarting of his presidential ambitions, for his steadfast adherence to his doctrine.

If you want to understand the seismic roilings of the 1850s in this country over the extension of slavery into places like Kansas and California then knowing about Douglas’ place in those political struggles is important. As for Professor Caper’s old time biography that would be a place to start not to finish now in the study of this central figure leading up to the Civil War.