Democratic Senator Stephen A Douglas example essay topic

Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, the son of Nancy Hanks and Thomas Lincoln, pioneer farmers. At the age of two he was taken by his parents to nearby Knob Creek and at eight to Spencer Co., Ind. The following year his mother died. In 1819 his father married Sarah Bush Johnston, a kindly widow. Lincoln grew up a tall, gangling youth, who could hold his own in physical contests and also showed great intellectual promise, although he had little formal education. After moving with his family to Macon Co., Ill., in 1831, he struck out on his own, taking a cargo to New Orleans, La., on a flatboat.

He then returned to Illinois and settled in New Salem, a short-lived community on the Sangamon River, where he split rails and clerked in a store. He gained the respect of his fellow townspeople, including the so called Clary Grove boys, who had challenged him to fight, and was elected captain of his company in the Black Hawk War. Returning from the war, he began an unsuccessful venture in shopkeeping that ended when his partner died. In 1833 he was appointed postmaster but had to supplement his income with surveying and various other jobs. At the same time he began to study law. The story of his romance with Ann Rutledge, a local young woman whom he knew briefly before her untimely death, is unsubstantiated.

Defeated in 1832 in a race for the state legislature, Lincoln was elected on the Whig ticket two years later and served in the lower house from 1834 to 1841. He quickly emerged as one of the leaders of the party and was one of the authors of the removal of the capital to Springfield, where he settled in 1837. After his admission to the bar he entered into successive partnerships with John T. Stuart, Stephen T. Logan, and William Herndon, and soon won recognition as an effective and resourceful attorney. In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a prominent Kentucky banker, and despite her somewhat difficult disposition, the marriage seems to have been reasonably successful.

The Lincolns had four children, only one of whom reached adulthood. His birth in a slave state notwithstanding, Lincoln had long opposed slavery. In the legislature he voted against resolutions favorable to the "peculiar institution" and in 1837 was one of two members who signed a protest against it. Elected to Congress in 1846, he attracted attention because of his outspoken criticism of the war with Mexico and formulated a plan for gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia. He was not an abolitionist, however. Conceding the right of the states to manage their own affairs, he merely sought to prevent the spread of human bondage.

The Lincoln and Douglas Debates was very famous. Douglas, a member of Congress since 1843 and a nationally prominent spokesman for the Democratic party, was seeking reelection to a third term in the U.S. Senate, and Lincoln was running for Douglas's Senate seat as a Republican. Because of Douglas's political stature, the campaign attracted national attention. Its outcome, it was thought, would determine the ability of the Democratic party to maintain unity in the face of the divisive sectional and slavery issues, and some were convinced it would determine the viability of the Union itself. 'The battle of the Union is to be fought in Illinois,' a Washington paper declared. Lincoln 'was losing interest in politics' when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress in 1854.

This legislation opened lands previously closed to slavery to the possibility of its spread by local option. Lincoln viewed the provisions of the act as immoral. Although he was not an abolitionist and though slavery unassailable protected by the Constitution in states where it already existed. Lincoln also thought that America's founders had put slavery on the way to 'ultimate extinction' by preventing its spread to new territories. He saw this act, which had been sponsored by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, as a new and alarming development.