Stephen Douglas

Stephen Douglas (1813-1861) was a politician in the United States in the period leading up to the American Civil War. A Democrat, Douglas's career closely coincided with that of Abraham Lincoln, and the two were lifelong rivals. They ran against one another in elections for a wide variety of elected offices and even competed for the hand of Mary Todd.

In 1860, Douglas lost the Presidential election to Lincoln when the Southern wing of the Democratic Party refused to support him as the national nominee in punishment for his rejection of Scott v Stanford and split the Democratic vote along regional lines.

Douglas urged the South to accept the result of the election and denounced secession as criminal. He promised to support Lincoln during the American Civil War, ensuring that the war would be a bipartisan effort.

Douglas died of typhoid very shortly after the war began.

Stephen Douglas in Southern Victory
In later generations, many Americans believed Stephen Douglas to have been a reasonable man who could have prevented the War of Secession had he won the 1860 election. However, this position is extremely problematic given the political conditions of the time and Douglas's own record for acquiescing to Southern interests.

Douglas was not so well-regarded among his contemporaries. For instance, when Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were debating Lincoln's intent to revise the platform of the Republican Party, Lincoln quipped that after all these years he was once again in "a Lincoln-Douglass debate," in reference to his long-ago 1858 Senatorial debate against his rival in which he forced Douglas to choose between maintaining his advocacy in popular sovereignty and supporting the Supreme Court's recent Scot v Sanford decision, thus ensuring that his upcoming Presidential run would fracture the Democratic Party along regional lines and open the door for a Republican victory.

For his part, Douglass testily informed Lincoln that he did not appreciate being compared to Douglas.

Stephen Douglas in "Lee at the Alamo"
In the face of Benjamin McCulloch's appeals to Robert E. Lee's Southern identity to support the right of Texas to secede from the Union before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President, Lee privately reflected that he would have preferred for any of Lincoln's three opponents (Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, or John Bell) to have won the election. Nevertheless, he was determined to perform his duty to the government no matter who headed it.

Stephen Douglas in The Disunited States of America
Stephen Douglas was a prominent figure in an alternate where the United States failed. When Beckie Royer suggested that Justin Monroe acted as if he'd never heard of the rounders player George Herman, Ted Snodgrass cited Stephen Douglas as a person, like Herman, that everyone had heard of.

Stephen Douglas in The Two Georges
During Stephen Douglas's tenure as Governor-General of the North American Union, the NAU expanded its borders past the Rocky Mountains.