Stephen A. Douglas

Stephen A. Douglas rose through Illinois politics to become a powerful United States senator. He championed popular sovereignty in the territories, debated Abraham Lincoln during the 1858 Senate campaign and ran against him for president in 1860 before supporting the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War.

In Barbara Hambly’s The Emancipator’s Wife, Douglas belongs to Mary Todd’s political and social world before her marriage to Abraham Lincoln and represents an alternative path within the rival ambitions of antebellum Illinois.