Stephen Douglas

In 1847, he married Martha Martin, with whom he had two sons; Robert M. Douglas and Stephen Arnold Douglas, Jr. During the birth of the couple’s third child, Martha passed away and so did the baby girl, the latter dying weeks after her birth.

In 1856, he married Adele Cutts, with whom he had a daughter, but who also survived only for a few weeks. She also suffered a miscarriage which weakened her immunity.

He passed away in Chicago after suffering from typhoid fever. He is interred on the shore of Lake Michigan. After his death, a monument and a tomb were erected in his memory, in 1883.

Stephen Arnold Douglas was born on April 23, 1813 to Sarah Fisk and Arnold Douglass, in Brandon, Vermont.

When he was a teenager, he made cabinets, but the appeal of law and political studies got him to quit this craft.

In 1833, he shifted to Ohio and then Winchester, Illinois, where he studied for legal studies, while simultaneously working as a teacher.

He passed his bar examinations in 1834 and established his own practice in Jacksonville.

In 1836, he was elected into the Illinois House of Representatives, which marked the beginning of his political career. In the next few years, he became a leader of the Illinois Democrats.

In 1841, at the age of 27, he was appointed as an associate justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. He resigned from this position after he was elected as a US Representative, two years later.

He was elected as a US Senator in 1846 and the next year, he became a member of the House of Representatives.

In the sectional crisis of 1850, he became one of the strongest supporters of ‘compromise’. However the ‘compromise’ bill was defeated.

By 1852, he was considered one of the Democrats’ national leaders. It was in this year he contended for the ‘Democratic presidential nomination’, but was ‘passed over’ for Franklin Pierce.

This famous American politician courted Mary Todd, who later became the wife of his arch rival and presidential opponent, Abraham Lincoln.