Stephen Douglas

Stephen Douglas. United States Senator (1813-1861). From 1847 until his death in 1861, Stephen Douglas was both a powerful U.S. senator and an influential Chicago resident. Douglas moved from Vermont to southern Illinois at age 20 to begin his career in law and politics, rising quickly among the Democrats of Illinois. , , In the Senate, he advocated western development and the continued expansion of the United States. As slavery divided the nation, Douglas sought to engineer political solutions such as the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. He articulated a doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which held that the people of the western territories should themselves decide whether slavery would be permitted. His position became difficult to maintain by the time of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. When the Civil War shattered his compromises in 1861, he supported the Union. , , In Chicago, Douglas was a land speculator and civic leader. He bought thousands of acres on the South and West Sides. His most prized property was along the lake shore in what is today the Douglas neighborhood. He donated ten acres of this land to the original University of Chicago, which survived for three decades at this site, 35th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. During the Civil War, part of Douglas’s land became Camp Douglas, an army camp and prison for Confederate soldiers.