At twenty-four he was register of public lands at Springfield. At twenty-one he was public prosecutor, or district attorney, of the judicial district,-an office which at twenty-three he resigned in order to enter the legislature. Within a month he had got the leadership of the Democrats of his neighborhood and county. From that day he rose faster than any other man in the state, if not in the whole country, notwithstanding that he rose on the lines along which many and many a young American was struggling toward eminence, and notwithstanding that Illinois was full, as later years were to prove, of young men exceptionally fit for such careers as he was seeking. In March, 1834, Stephen Arnold Douglas, an unknown youth from Vermont, poor, delicate, almost diminutive in physical stature, and not yet of age, was admitted to the bar of Illinois, and opened an office at Jacksonville, in the county of Morgan. If it fell short of the others in variety of confrontments if it was not so long drawn out, or accompanied with so frequent and imposing alignments and realignments of vast contending forces on a broad and national field, it surpassed them in the clearness of the sole and vital issue it involved, in a closer contact and measuring of powers, in the complete and subtle correspondence of the characters of the rivals to the causes for which they fought. HAMILTON and Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, Douglas and Lincoln,-these have been the three great rivalries of American politics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |