Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics

National politics made strange bed-fellows in the winter of 1857-8. Douglas consorting with Republicans and flouting the administration, was a rare spectacle. There was a moment...

With the occupation of Oregon and of the gold fields of California, American colonization lost temporarily its conservative character. That heel-and-toe process, which had hithe...

The news of the capitulation of Fort Sumter reached Washington on Sunday morning, April 14th. At a momentous cabinet meeting, President Lincoln read the draft of a proclamation...

On the day after the election, the palmetto and lone star flag was thrown out to the breeze from the office of the Charleston _Mercury_ and hailed with cheers by the populace. "...

The young attorney who opened a law office in the Court House at Jacksonville, bore little resemblance to the forlorn lad who had vainly sought a livelihood there some months ea...

Deeds of violence are the inevitable precursors of an approaching war. They are so many expressions of that estrangement which is at the root of all sectional conflicts. The rai...

When Douglas reached Chicago, immediately after the adjournment of Congress, he found the city in an uproar. The strong anti-slavery sentiment of the community had been outraged...

When Congress assembled in December, 1849, statesmen of the old school, who could agree in nothing else, were of one mind in this: the Union was in peril. In the impressive word...

The author of the Kansas-Nebraska bill doubtless anticipated a gradual and natural occupation of the new Territories by settlers like those home-seekers who had taken up governm...

Had anyone prophesied at the close of the year 1856, that within a twelvemonth Douglas would be denounced as a traitor to Democracy, he would have been thought mad. That Douglas...

The defeat of President Tyler's treaty in June, 1844, just on the eve of the presidential campaign, gave the Texas question an importance which the Democrats in convention had n...

When Douglas took his seat in Congress for the first time, an unknown man in unfamiliar surroundings, he found as his near neighbor, one David S. Reid, a young lawyer from North...

The passing of the Whig party after its defeat in the election of 1852, must be counted among the most momentous facts in our political history. Whatever were its errors, whatev...

Douglas had achieved a great personal triumph. Not even his Republican opponents could gainsay it. In the East, the Republican newspapers applauded him undisguisedly, not so muc...

A long and involved diplomatic history preceded President Polk's simple announcement that "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and she...

The years were passing rapidly during which Douglas should have laid broad and deep the foundations of his professional career, if indeed law was to be more than a convenient av...

In his own constituency a member of the national House of Representatives may be a marked man; but his office confers no particular distinction at the national capital. He must...

The dramatic moments in the colonizing of coastal New England have passed into song, story, and sober chronicle; but the farther migration of the English people, from tide-water...

When Douglas entered Washington in the fall of 1847, as junior Senator from Illinois, our troops had occupied the city of Mexico and negotiations for peace were well under way....

Vast changes had passed over Illinois since Douglas set foot on its soil, a penniless boy with his fortune to make. The frontier had been pushed back far beyond the northern bou...