Autobiography of Stephen A. Douglas: Reprinted From the Journal of the Illinois Stat Historical Society, October, 1912 (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Autobiography of Stephen A. Douglas: Reprinted From the Journal of the Illinois Stat Historical Society, October, 1912

While collecting material for a biographical study of Stephen Arnold Douglas, Judge Robert M. Douglas of North Carolina, a son, kindly loaned me this little autobiography. Added to the story as told me personally by the late Colonel John Dement and the sketch published years ago in Harper's Monthly Magazine by Daniel Roberts, we now are enabled for the first time to secure a correct knowledge of the early life of Douglas.

When Stephen A. Douglas kissed his mother good bye at the homestead gate near Canandaigua, New York, her last inquiry was: "And when shall you come home to visit us, my son?" "On my way to Congress, mother," he answered. And so the first visit was to be made ten years afterwards, almost to a day. Douglas started westward determined to make for himself a political career. Just what point he should seek was undetermined; so at Cleveland, he tarried with relatives for the purpose of getting his bearings. With the personal manipulation of those bearings, Douglas had so little to do that it might be said he literally drifted until circumstances, none of them propitious, landed him, sick, footsore from his ten mile walk from Exeter, at the end of a raw day of November, in the little village of Winchester, then in the county of Morgan, in the State of Illinois.

He was so worn by his long sickness that he could scarcely stagger along the road, yet he walked bravely forward with but a shilling in money as the total of his worldly possessions. He presented his boyish but courageous face to the landlord and asked for a credit in board until he could secure pupils enough to warrant his remaining in Winchester. Like the western tavern keeper of his time, that one was charmed by the manly little chap who requested it.

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