the people of Winchester. Some of the leading men, thinking it would be a pity for so valuable a youth to trudge on any further in quest of fortune, and still a greater pity for Winchester to lose him, bestirred themselves in his behalf, and secured his appointment as teacher to the winter school, which he gladly accepted.

Stephen A. Douglas was the name of this popular young man, and thus it was that he began his career in Illinois, which he afterwards represented in Congress for so many years and with so much distinction.

His father was a respectable physician, practising in Rutland County, Vermont, and there Stephen was born, in 1813. When the boy was two months old, Dr. Douglas, while holding him in his arms, dropped dead from apoplexy, and his widow, inheriting little from her husband, went to live upon a farm of which she was half owner. Douglas, therefore, began life as most of the eminent men of America had begun it, by hoeing corn, chopping wood, and "doing chores" upon a farm, attending the district school during the winter. He was a reading, ambitious boy, not disposed to spend his days in manual labor. There seemed, however, no other destiny in store for him, since his mother could not then afford to continue his education. At fifteen he apprenticed himself to a carpenter, worked at the trade two years, and was then obliged to abandon it from a failure of his health. I am not surprised to learn that Douglas used to say that the happiest days of his life were those spent in the carpenter's shop. His speeches show that he had a mathematical head; and he had a decided turn for constructing and planning. No doubt there was an excellent carpenter lost to the country when he took off his apron.

From his seventeenth year to his twentieth he was enabled, by his mother's aid, to attend academies and study law, in the States of Vermont and New York; and it was early in the year 1833 that he turned his steps westward in search of fortune. Starting with a considerable sum of money in his pocket,—a hundred dollars or so,- all went well with him until he reached Cleveland, in Ohio, where he fell sick, and was detained almost all the summer. When he recovered he pushed on, with his

purse sadly reduced, to Cincinnati, and so on to St. Louis, and round to Jacksonville, in Illinois, which he reached with thirtyseven and a half cents in his pocket. He appears to have been hard to please in the matter of a residence. Seeing no opening for a young man at Jacksonville, he walked on to Winchester, sixteen miles distant, and arrived, as we have seen, all but penniless, with his coat on his arm. There, I suppose, he must have stopped from the failure of his supplies. The accident of his catching the eye of the auctioneer supplied him with a capital upon which to begin his life there, and the favor of the people did the rest.

School-master Douglas was successful with his school. He had forty pupils that winter, who paid him three dollars each per quarter; and he had leisure in the evenings to continue his legal studies, and on Saturdays to conduct petty cases before justices of the peace. He did so well that, early in the spring (March, 1834), when he had taught his school just three months, he gave it up, opened an office, and began the practice of the law. He was then twenty-one years of age. There was something about this young lawyer that was extremely pleasing to western people, and he appears to have instantly obtained wide celebrity at the bar; for before he had been practising & year, and before he was twenty-two years old, the legislature of the State elected him attorney-general. Next year he was himself a member of the legislature, -the youngest man in either house, -and two years after, President Van Buren appointed him to the profitable office of Register of the Land Office at Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln, that very spring, had established himself as a lawyer.

Such rapid and unbroken success was remarkable, and was itself a cause of further triumph. The next event, however, in his public life was a failure; but that failure did more for him, as a politician, than any ordinary success could have done. Before he had attained the legal age-twenty-five- he was nominated for member of Congress in the most populous district of Illinois, nay, the most populous one in the whole country,there being in it nearly forty thousand voters. Douglas, accord ing to the western fashion, mounted the stump, and spoke daily

to multitudes of people. Seldom has any district been more thoroughly canvassed, and seldom have the minds of men been more inflamed with party zeal. Douglas lost his election by five votes; but when it was known that enough votes had been rejected because his name was spelled upon the tickets with double s at the end of it, every one felt that his failure was a triumph.

In 1840 there was another signal defeat of the Democratic party, which to him, personally, was a splendid success. Every one who is old enough remembers the presidential election of that year, when General Harrison and Mr. Van Buren were the candidates, and log cabins were built in every town, and much bad cider was drunk in them to the success of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Every State in the Union, except two or threc. gave its vote for General Harrison. Illinois remained true to the Democratic party, and this was chiefly due to the wonderful exertions of Stephen A. Douglas, then but twenty-seven years of age. For seven months he gave himself wholly up to the business of canvassing the State, in the course of which he made two hundred and thirteen speeches. It was the policy of Andrew Jackson, adopted and continued by Martin Van Buren, that was on trial during that summer of excitement. The young orator supported that policy without reserve. Illinois, then an agricultural State almost exclusively, had suffered from the financial policy of the government as much as the eastern States, but it had recovered faster, and the young orator dwelt chiefly upon the good and great things done by General Jackson. It was admitted by friend and opponent that it was the "Little Giant" that kept Illinois from joining the movement that swept the other States irresistibly away.

Nor was it his free and easy style of oratory alone that held the State to its old allegiance. Douglas, as before observed, had a mathematical head. He was a great manager and contriver. I have sometimes thought that if he had had a military education, and had had a chance to develop his talents by active service, he would have been a good, and perhaps a great general. He possessed three qualities of a general, a power of attach