Stephen A. Douglas A Study in American Politics

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

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 to interior, has been too prosaic a theme for poets and too diverse a movement for historians. Yet when all the factors in our national history shall be given their full value, none will seem more potent than the great racial drift from the New England frontier into the heart of the continent. The New Englanders who formed a broad belt from Vermont and New York across the Northwest to Kansas, were a social and political force of incalculable power, in the era which ended with the Civil War. The New Englander of the Middle West, however, ceased to be altogether a Yankee. The lake and prairie plains bred a spirit which contrasted strongly with the smug provincialism of rock-ribbed and sterile New England. The exultation born of wide, unbroken, horizon lines and broad, teeming, prairie landscapes, found expression in the often-quoted saying, "Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of this globe for a man to be born in, provided he emigrates when he is very young." The career of Stephen Arnold Douglas is intelligible only as it is viewed against the background of a New England boyhood, a young manhood passed on the prairies of Illinois, and a wedded life pervaded by the gentle culture of Southern womanhood.

In America, observed De Tocqueville two generations ago, democracy disposes every man to forget his ancestors. When the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas was once asked to prepare an account of his career for a biographical history of Congress, he chose to omit all but the barest reference to his forefathers. Possibly he preferred to leave the family tree naked, that his unaided rise to eminence might the more impress the chance reader. Yet the records of the Douglass family are not uninteresting. The first of the name to cross the ocean was William Douglass, who was born in Scotland and who wedded Mary Ann, daughter of Thomas Marble of Northampton. Just when this couple left Old England is not known, but the birth of a son is recorded in Boston, in the year 1645. Soon after this event they removed to New London, preferring, it would seem, to try their luck in an outlying settlement, for this region was part of the Pequot country. Somewhat more than a hundred years later, Benajah Douglass, a descendant of this pair and grandfather of the subject of this sketch, pushed still farther into the interior, and settled in Rensselaer County, in the province of New York. The marriage of Benajah Douglass to Martha Arnold, a descendant of Governor William Arnold of Rhode Island, has an interest for those who are disposed to find Celtic qualities in the grandson, for the Arnolds were of Welsh stock, and may be supposed to have revived the strain in the Douglass blood.

Tradition has made Benajah Douglass a soldier in the war of the Revolution, but authentic records go no farther back than the year 1795, when he removed with his family to Brandon, Vermont....