Published August 9, 2025
By Reg Ankrom
It was one of American history’s great ironies. Stephen A. Douglas in 1843 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Fifth Congressional District centered in Quincy, Illinois, Adams County’s seat of government. The two political subdivisions in westernmost Illinois were named in honor of John Quincy Adams, recently elected the sixth president of the United States. The vision of these two men could not have been farther apart.
The Illinois General Assembly on January 13, 1825, established the state’s westernmost subdivision as Adams County at founder John Wood’s request. Morgan County pioneer Seymour Kellogg, one of the three state commissioners whose duty was to locate the County seat, insisted it, too, be named for Adams. Immortalizing Adams twice was evidence of just how much Kellogg detested the fact that his county’s seat of government was named Jacksonville for the hero of the 1814 Battle of New Orleans and the man Adams beat for president in 1824.
Douglas arrived in Washington, D.C. in December 1843, as the youngest representative in the 28th Congress. There, he met fourth-term Massachusetts congressman John Quincy Adams, the oldest. That Adams was first elected to the House as an Anti-Mason was not lost on Douglas. In his first campaign for the House in 1830, Adams denounced Freemasonry as incompatible with republican government. That was a strike against Jackson, who served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Tennessee in 1821-23. A Mason himself, Douglas attended Bodley Lodge No. 1, the first Masonic lodge in Illinois, while a Quincy resident from 1841 to 1847.
Their congressional contests were more than a coincidence. They represented major differences in ideologies and tensions in the republic itself. Adams’s vision was of constitutional restraint and moral leadership. Douglas was an upstart populist focused on aggressive westward expansionism and majority rule.
Quincyans sought to align their new river town with the legacy of New England virtue, order, and progress that Adams represented. Adams, like his father John Adams, symbolized a politics rooted in public service, international diplomacy, and a belief in the republic as a bulwark of liberty and law. Naming the town “Quincy” was a gesture to the intellectual traditions of the East.
By the 1840s, however, the political climate in Illinois — and the nation — had shifted dramatically. Jackson beat Adams in their second presidential race in 1828 and held the presidency for two terms. The rise of Jacksonian Democracy between 1828 and 1836 redefined American politics, launched expansion, hailed populism, and established a more confrontational approach to executive power. This was the new political world into which stepped Stephen A. Douglas, a man destined to become the leading spokesman for this new political creed.
Their first contest came quickly. On January 9, 1844, days after he took his seat in the House, Douglas introduced a resolution to refund a $1,000 fine General Jackson paid after a federal judge found him in contempt for enforcing martial law in New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. Jackson believed British spies still roamed Louisiana. Douglas sought to vindicate Old Hickory’s patriotism and leadership. Adams opposed it as an affront to civil liberty and judicial independence. The bill passed, and Congress refunded Jackson’s fine with 5 percent interest.
The debate between Adams and Douglas exposed the profound gulf between them. Adams regarded Douglas’s tone and manner offensive. In his diary, he referred to Douglas derisively as a “homunculus,” a term implying physical and moral smallness.
Their most direct confrontation came during debates in 1845 over the annexation of Texas into the Union. Adams fiercely opposed it, seeing it as an attempt to expand slavery’s reach and tip the political balance toward the South. Douglas, true to his Democratic loyalties and his promise to expand the nation, supported annexation. To Adams, Douglas’s position was both morally bankrupt and a threat to the Union. To Douglas, Adams’s objections were an elitist form of sectionalism that denied the will of the American people.
At the heart of their differences was the principle of popular sovereignty, Douglas’s belief that the inhabitants of territories should decide the question of slavery for themselves. His advocacy of this doctrine would become his political hallmark, visible in even his early debates with Adams.
As early as June 1844, Douglas argued that the Constitution did not permit Congress to impose governance without the consent of the governed. Adams disagreed, responding that Congress not only had the authority but the duty to do so. Douglas surprised his colleagues, including Adams, when he pointed out that in his days as a diplomat and U.S. Senator, Adams argued that territorial governance rested on the consent of the people.
“Congress have no authority,” said Adams when arguing about organizing the Louisiana Territory in 1804, “to establish any form of government whatever in that country without the express consent of the inhabitants thereof.”
Douglas pointed out that Adams was the only New England senator to favor new states in the recently purchased Louisiana Territory without limitation on slavery. Adams did not correct Douglas, but it was clear his views about governance had changed.
“No power more vitally belongs to Congress,” Adams now argued, “than the authority to create governments in the public territories.” Behind their arguments were two competing visions: Adams’s of a moral federal government with broad authority to limit slavery, and Douglas’s of a democratic union that could tolerate slavery where the people so chose.
On February 21, 1848, Adams, then 80 years old, collapsed at his desk in the House chamber after opposing a resolution to honor American generals in the Mexican-American War. The bill’s purpose, Adams said, was to expand slavery. Douglas, who supported the resolution and the war, saw its purpose to expand the nation.
The relationship between Adams and Douglas was marked by a tension in the constitutional dialogue that defined America of their time. Adams, “Old Man Eloquent,” pressed a case for morality in governance and slavery. Douglas, the constitutionalist, forged a doctrine of consent based on law.
Reg Ankrom is a former director of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County. He is a local historian, author of a prize-winning two-volume biography of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and a frequent speaker on Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and antebellum America.
Sources:
Adams, Charles Francis, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol 11. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1877.
Adams, John Quincy. The Writings of John Quincy Adams, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
Ankrom, Reg. Stephen A. Douglas: The Political Apprenticeship, 1833–1843. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing Co., 2015.
Congressional Globe, 30th Cong.,1st Sess. February 22, 1848.
Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
Kaplan, Fred. John Quincy Adams: American Visionary. Harper Brothers, 2014.
Miller, William Lee. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Richards, Leonard. The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Taub, James. John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit. Basic Books, 2016.
