Stephen Koenig, age 15, of Las Vegas, Nev., for his question:
WHO WAS THE DOUGLAS IN THE LINCOLN DOUGLAS DEBATES?
Stephen Arnold Douglas, a popular and distinguished political leader from Illinois, was the man who became famous for his debates with Abraham Lincoln on the question of slavery.
Born in Brandon, Vt., in 1813, Douglas moved to Illinois when he was 20 years old and became a lawyer. A Democrat, he was elected prosecuting attorney for his district in 1835 and the next year he was elected to the state legislature. He served as a judge on the Supreme Court of Illinois from 1841 until 1843.
In 1843 Douglas was elected to the United States House of Representatives and in 1847 he became a member of the United States Senate.
Douglas became known as the Little Giant. He was a short man but had a large head and broad shoulders. He won wide respect in the Senate for his ability, energy, sincerity and fearlessness.
The slavery controversy was the great issue of that period. Douglas would not have slaves himself, but he was not opposed to slavery and did not believe that the United States should be sacrificed for it. He warmly favored westward expansion, but believed that the people of the territories should decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery.
When Douglas ran for re election to the Senate in 1858, his Republican opponent was Abraham Lincoln, a man then almost unknown outside Illinois. The two held a series of public meetings in which they debated the problem of slavery and its extension. These debates attracted the attention of the entire country.
Douglas argued that the people must have the right to control slavery. Lincoln said that a nation half slave and half free could not exist.
Douglas won his re election to the Senate, but some of his speeches in the debates displeased many people of the nation.
Stephen Douglas was nominated for president of the United States by Northern Democrats in 1860, but the South refused to support him. The Democratic Party split its votes among three candidates. Douglas received only 12 electoral votes. The Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the election and the presidency of the United States.
Douglas offered his services to President Lincoln when the Civil War broke out. At Lincoln's request, Douglas started on a tour of the border states to arouse enthusiasm for the Union cause.
But two months after the fall of Fort Sumter, Douglas died. He was buried in a small park at the foot of 36th Street in Chicago.
There were seven of the famous Lincoln Douglas debates. Each candidate spoke for an hour and a half. Large crowds attended all but one of the debates. The poorly attended meeting was at Jonesboro, in the southernmost part of the state.
Newspapers reported on all of the debates and both men drew national attention.