was considerably less dramatic. He simply
rolled into Jacksonville, the seat of Mor-
gan County, aboard a stagecoach in the
middle of the night on November 2, 1833.
Not yet 21, Douglas had less than $5 in his
pocket when he arrived. Like Lincoln, he
was following the well-worn path of young
men seeking their fortunes on the westward
frontier. The chance to reinvent himself in
new surroundings was particularly appeal-
ing to both Lincoln and Douglas, each of
whom was leaving behind a less-than-idyl-
lic home life. Lincoln and his hard-working
taciturn father, Thomas, had always had a
distant relationship, and by the time he left
home, the younger Lincoln had developeda lifelong aversion to physical labor and a
thirst to explore the “wider and fairer
world” beyond the borders of their Indi-
ana farm.
Douglas, whose own physician father
had died when he was two months old, had
grown up in Vermont and upstate New
York, where he took an early interest in
politics and studied law with the leading
Democratic politician in Canandaigua,
New York, before setting out for the West
to seek his fortune. When his mother asked
when she would see him again, Douglasresponded, “On my way to Congress.” He
immediately set out to back up his words,
winning election as state’s attorney for the
First Judicial District in Illinois in 1834 by
a mere four votes and bragging in a letter
home that he was “doing as well in my pro-
fession as could be expected of a boy of
twenty-one.”
One of the new legislators Douglas met
in the halls of the state capital at Vandalia
was Abraham Lincoln, who had won his
own first election (on his second try) to the
legislature. Exactly when and how the two
men met is unknown. Lincoln later recalled
vaguely in 1859 that it had taken place
“twenty-two years ago.” Douglas nevermentioned a first meeting at all. From the
start they were on opposite sides of the
aisle: Lincoln was a Whig and Douglas was
a Democrat. Whigs, primarily northern
and Midwestern in origin, were the party of
small shop owners, manufacturers, entre-
preneurs, and tradesmen; Democrats, the
party of Andrew Jackson, centered their
strength in the agrarian South. Whigs
favored a weak president, a powerful Con-
gress, and a centralized government that
provided a solid infrastructure for interstate
trade and commerce. Democrats wanted astrong president but also, conversely, a sys-
tem based on states’ rights. In the South, of
course, the major states’ right was the right
to own slaves. On that issue the two par-
ties were fated to do battle.
By the time Lincoln and Douglas became
politically active in the late 1830s and
1840s, the issue of slavery was a settled
fact. The Missouri Compromise of 1820
had outlawed the expansion of slavery into
new territories above the 36th Parallel,
with the exception of Missouri. The com-
promise held until the Mexican War, con-
ducted by Democratic President James K.
Polk, greatly added to American territories
in the West. Whigs, including then-Con-
gressman Abraham Lincoln, opposed the
war as a naked power grab by Southern
slave owners to expand their reach. A new
compromise, in 1850, allowed the recently
acquired territory of California to enter the
Union as a free state but also put into place
a federal Fugitive Slave Law that required
Northerners to assist in the return of run-
away slaves to their Southern owners. One
of the leaders of the Compromise of 1850
was Stephen Douglas, then serving as a
U.S. senator.
Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War
led to his defeat after only one term in Con-
gress. He returned to the private practice
of law in his adopted hometown of Spring-
field, Illinois, while Douglas ascended to
the heights of power in the Senate. Douglas
also called Springfield home, and he and
Lincoln crossed swords several times in the
decade prior to the 1850 Compromise.
Besides their usual political differences, the
two men were also rivals for the hand of a
vivacious young Springfield debutante,
Kentucky-born Mary Todd. The bright,
talkative Mary was a more compatible
match for Douglas than she was for the
awkward, plain-spoken Lincoln. She and
Douglas flirted across Springfield drawing
rooms and went on long, chatty walks
together. But as a lifelong Whig and a fam-
ily friend of party leader Henry Clay, Mary
could not commit to the Democrat Dou-
glas. “I liked him well enough, but that was
all,” she said later. Instead, she married Lin-
coln in November 1842. It was a marriageKentucky Senator Henry Clay, shown addressing Congress, helped craft the Compromise of 1850 with fellow
Senator Stephen Douglas. It held for only four years.CWQ-Sum16 Lincoln Douglas_Layout 1 4/20/16 4:03 PM Page 26