1-272-979 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Stephen A Douglas, American politician, 1862-1867. Douglas (1813-1861) was a leading figure in Congress in the 1850s and proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that established the right of settlers in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to determine whether or not to allow slavery. The Act was seen as a concession to the southern slave-owning states and had the consequences of precipitating the founding of the Republican Party and moving the US closer to its eventual civil war. In 1860 Douglas ran for President but came fourth in the election won by Abraham Lincoln. He died from typhoid fever in Chicago in 1861. An engraving from volume I of The War with the South : a History of the Late Rebellion, by Robert Tomes, Benjamin G Smith, New York, Virtue & Yorston, 3 Volumes, 1862-1867.