Location: NC 704 east of Madison
County: Rockingham
Original Date Cast: 1939
Stephen A. Douglas, U.S. Senator, Congressman, and state Supreme County judge, lived most of his adult life in Illinois. In 1847, while running for his first term in the Senate, he married Martha Martin of Rockingham County.
Born in Vermont to Dr Stephen A. Douglas and Sarah Fisk in 1813, Stephen Arnold Douglas was an infant when his father died, leaving the family under the care of his uncle until Fisk remarried around 1830. After the marriage, Douglas’s mother moved the family to New York, when he remained only until 1833. Settling in Illinois, Douglas independently read law while working as a schoolteacher.
Douglas received a license to practice law, eventually becoming the state attorney of Illinois and a state Supreme Court Justice. He launched his political career with his election as a state representative in 1836. In 1837 he left the legislature to serve as the Register of the Land Office in Springfield, the newly established capital of Illinois. In 1843 he was elected to Congress.
Douglas resigned from his seat in the House of Representatives in 1847 upon being elected to the U.S. Senate by the legislature of Illinois. He remained in the Senate until his death in 1861, serving as the chairman of the Committee for the Territories, which proposed the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He ran for president in 1860, but lost to Abraham Lincoln, partially due to the loss of Southern Democrats support over his opposition to slavery. He is best remembered for his debates with Lincoln.
Douglas married his first wife, Martha Denny Martin, in Rockingham County on April 7, 1847. Martha Martin was the daughter of Rockingham County planter Robert Martin. Upon her father’s death she inherited large plantations in North Carolina and Mississippi, as well as 150 slaves. She died in 1853, after the birth of three children, and Douglas inherited her property, including the slaves. The association with slavery harmed Douglas’s political career within his Northern constituency, but it was ultimately his sharp opposition to slavery that cost him political success amongst his Democrat peers. Douglas died of typhoid fever in Chicago in 1861 and was buried there. The site is now known as the Stephen Douglas Memorial Park.
References:
Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (1947)
Biographical Directory of the American Congress online: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000457
James W. Sheahan, The Life of Stephen A. Douglas (1860)