Quincy's Judge Douglas

Stephen A. Douglas, a Jacksonian Democrat, arrived in Quincy in 1841 and at twenty-seven became the youngest Supreme Court Judge in Illinois history. In 1843 he defeated Quincy Whig Orville H. Browning for the U.S. House of Representatives, became chairman of the House Committee on the Territories, and later held the same post in the U.S. Senate after the Illinois legislature elected him in 1846. With a statewide constituency, he moved to Chicago and rose to great political power, earning the nickname "The Little Giant" for his political acumen. Called Judge Douglas in his adopted town of Quincy and by Lincoln during their debates, he was standing 5'4" the most powerful Democrat and legislator when the Legislative Branch of the Federal Government was most influential. The Compromise of 1850 that he brokered helped preserve the Union for a decade. As Illinois Secretary of State in 1840, he certified a liberal charter for the City of Nauvoo, making the new Mormon community virtually autonomous, and later wrote a bill increasing the number of Illinois Supreme Court justices, then had himself appointed justice in Quincy's Fifth Judicial District, which included the new voters in Nauvoo. During the 1843 congressional race, he sought Mormon support, and after clashes between Mormons and their neighbors in 1845, Congressman Douglas returned from Washington to help resolve the impasse that had led to Joseph Smith's death and turmoil in Hancock County, helping negotiate the plan that moved the Mormons to Deseret, Utah. Disturbed by Douglas's 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he believed would spread slavery, Lincoln challenged him for his Senate seat in 1858, and Douglas returned to Quincy on October 13, 1858, for his sixth debate with Republican Lincoln. Douglas won that Senate contest, but two years later he lost the presidential contest to Lincoln.

Quincy, Illinois · United States