Quincy’s Douglas Goes to Washington

His itinerary was appropriate for Congressman-Elect Stephen
A. Douglas, who left his Quincy home at the southeast corner of Third and York Streets
for Washington, D.C. in October 1843. After visiting his mother in Clifton
Springs, New York—keeping a promise he made a decade earlier that he would see
her within ten years on his way to Congress, Douglas’s route to the U.S.
capitol took him through a free state, Pennsylvania, and a slave state,
Maryland. If he were to succeed in his intention to expand the nation, he would
require the friendship of often bitterly opposed fellow congressmen from those
northern and southern sections.

Douglas boasted of his big idea for nation-building during
his campaign around Western Illinois’ nine-county Fifth Congressional District.
He told his neighbors that if they sent him to Congress, he intended to “build
an ocean-bound republic” across the continent, from Atlantic to Pacific.

“I would blot out the lines on the map which now mark our
national boundaries on this continent,” he bragged under the bright skies of
Carthage and Mt. Sterling, and Quincy, “and make the area of liberty as broad
as the continent itself. I would allow no more disputes about boundaries or red
lines upon the maps.” Red lines referred to interests of Britain, France, and
Spain in Texas, Oregon, and the Louisiana Territory. Outside of Adams County,
which Browning took from Douglas in the August 3 election, farmers and artisans
of the rural Fifth District responded to the American adventure Douglas
proposed.

Building a nation, he told them, would also require
building ways to communicate and to connect the great new expanse, which would
double the size of the nation’s map, to their nation’s government. And
railroads were what he proposed. He promised to work for railroads and the
organization of territories on which to build them on routes he foresaw between
Quincy and Texas, then an independent republic, and unorganized Oregon.

Douglas
knew well that accomplishment of these goals—of any goals—would not be easy.
Slavery was a harsh and jealous harlot which seemed to attach herself to every
bill that came before the Congress. She was regaled and reviled. Douglas had
seen her influence in Quincy where slavery, as near as the state of Missouri
just across the Mississippi River, was tolerated by some and fully rejected by
others in his own westernmost Illinois city. In Congress, his goals would
require that he influence and win support from colleagues, stiffly on both
sides of the slavery issue.

Before
his first visit to the capitol on the morning of December 4, 1843, Douglas took
up lodging at John Tayloe’s low-profile, two-story hotel at 14th
Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. British novelist Charles Dickens had stayed
there a few months before Douglas arrived and considered the accommodations ungenerous.
Douglas was not so critical. He thought the place well kept and the staff
accommodating. Three years later, brothers Henry and Edward Willard, acquired
that property and all others in the block, remodeled the hotel, including a
six-story expansion, to become the famous Willard Hotel.

After
breakfast, Douglas walked to the U.S. capitol in which the massive central
rotunda, 96 feet in diameter, its dome towering 96 feet overhead, made him a
minimalist figure. That would change over the next 18 years of his service
here. He thrilled at the paintings by American artist John Trumbull, whom
Congress commissioned in February 1817 to complete four huge paintings to tell
the most notable events of the American revolution. Each 18 feet wide and 12
feet wide, the heroic works had been installed as Trumbull finished them
between 1819 and 1824.

Quincy’s
former judge took special note of Lady Justice, who held in her right hand an
unrolling scroll of the opening words of the U.S. Constitution and the scales
of justice in her left. Luigi Persico’s classical statue was unmasked and
looking up, allegorically a clear sighted standard for American law.

The
roster of the House of Representatives, which the “Congressional Globe” printed
on Page One of its December 4, 1843, issue, included Representative Stephen A.
Douglas of the Fifth Congressional District, Illinois. It was a thrill for
Douglas to see his name there, among those of men about whom he had read, names
like Hamilton Fish and Preston King of New York, Joseph Ingersoll of
Pennsylvania, Howell Cobb of Georgia, Linn Boyd (whom he had met on the
steamboat on the Ohio River ten years earlier) and Garret Davis of Kentucky; Joshua
Giddings of Ohio. There, too, were fellow freshmen like Hannibal Hamlin of
Maine, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, and David Settle Reid of North Carolina.

Seating
arrangements placed Reid and Douglas next to each other on the Democratic side
of the House floor. They had much in common. Reid was born on April 19, 1813,
four days before Douglas. Each was 5’4,” a lawyer, and devotees of President
Andrew Jackson. Reid’s important role to Douglas would be the introduction of
his cousin. Martha Denny Martin, 19, the daughter of Robert Martin, a wealthy
North Carolina slave plantation owner. She and Douglas were married on April 7,
1847. Douglas declined his new father-in-law’s offer of one of his two slave
plantations as a wedding gift.

Douglas’s
found chaos waiting as he entered the House chamber on his first day in
Congress, December 4, 1843. The House uproar was over a law Whigs passed two
years earlier, during one of two times they had controlled Congress. It
required states to elect their congressmen by districts instead of statewide.
Four states in 1843 ignored the law, and a crisis of constitutional proportion was
developing over seating and which party would control the House.

Recognizing
Douglas’s background in jurisprudence as judge and supreme court justice in
Illinois, Speaker John Jones of Virginia appointed Douglas to the Committee on Elections
to decide the matter. The eight other members of the committee delegated
Douglas to write the decision. On January 22, 1844, Douglas reported his
decision. The former judge and justice found against the Whig law. Nothing in
the constitution, he wrote, gave the Congress the authority to tell the states
how to elect their representatives. His decision ended the crisis. And it gave
Democrats control of the House. .

Sources

Ankrom, Reg.

Stephen A. Douglas: Western Man,
1844-1850.

(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishing Co., 2020), 30,
45.

“The Capital at Washington, “Burton’s

Gentleman’s
Magazine.

Volume 5, William E. Burton

and
Edgar A. Poe, Eds. (Philadelphia: William E. Burton, 1839), 234

Congressional Globe,

28th
Congress, 1st Session, 4-5, 226, 276-277

Congressional Globe,

28th
Congress, 2nd Session, 226.

Putnam, George. “Four Months with Charles Dickens, “The

Atlantic Magazine

, October 1870.

Stevens, Frank. “The Life of Stephen A. Douglas

,

”

Journal of the Illinois State Historical

Society.

(Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1924), 642.

“Willard Hotel,”

Willis, Henry Parker.

Stephen A. Douglas.

(Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs Co., 1910), 77.