Almost President by Scott Farris Page A

of Washington, D.C. Douglas did not merely preserve the Democratic Party; he also played an important role in creating a set of facts on the ground that proved to be essential to the preservation of the Union.
    Despite his final attempt at appeasement, once the war began, Douglas left no doubt where his loyalties lay. Embittered that his efforts at conciliation were so poorly received by the South, when secession came Douglas proposed to fight it with a greater ferocity than Lincoln. When Lincoln told Douglas he initially planned to call up seventy-five thousand militia, Douglas urged him to call up nearly three times that number, telling Lincoln that he would have to deal sharply with the South. “You do not know the dishonest purposes of these men as well as I do,” Douglas told Lincoln of the secessionists. “If I were president, I’d convert or hang them all within forty-eight hours.”
    In a private meeting, which he later reported to the press with Lincoln’s permission, Douglas assured Lincoln that Northern Democrats would seek no partisan advantage from the conflict. “Our Union must be preserved,” he said. “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I am with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” After Douglas left their meeting, Lincoln exclaimed, “What a noble man Douglas is!”
    Lincoln had not always thought so. For most of their adult lives, their rivalry was one-sided in favor of Douglas, which made Lincoln uncharacteristically jealous. Lincoln was four years older than Douglas, and while Lincoln achieved considerable political success at a young age (he was a state legislator at age twenty-five), it paled next to Douglas’s extraordinary rise to prominence. Douglas was an Illinois Supreme Court justice at age twenty-seven, a U.S. senator at thirty-three, and a serious presidential contender in 1852 at age thirty-nine, by which time he was the most famous, respected, and controversial statesman in America. Lincoln, meanwhile, remained unknown outside Illinois, until he ran a gallant but losing race against Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1858.
    Lincoln spent his adult years measuring himself against Douglas and, at least until he won the presidency, found himself lacking. Shortly after returning to politics in 1856, Lincoln wrote:
    Twenty-two years ago, Judge Douglas and I became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious; I perhaps quite as much as he. With me the race of ambition has been—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation, and is not unknown even in foreign lands. I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.
    Lincoln, of course, would far exceed that eminence by becoming what most consider our greatest president. Douglas, meanwhile, is forever linked to and overshadowed by Lincoln. Worse for Douglas, with Lincoln being America’s foremost secular saint, popular perception has been that his great opponent, Douglas, must have been a great sinner. Yet, as Douglas repeatedly pointed out in their famed 1858 Senate debates, he and Lincoln held many similar political views—so similar that, to Lincoln’s great chagrin, several prominent Republicans tried to recruit Douglas to become a Republican and the party nominee in 1860. But in the monumental disagreement between Lincoln and Douglas—the morality of slavery—there was a chasm between them as great as their disparity in height.
    The names “Lincoln and Douglas” are as comfortably paired in the popular imagination as Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, and standing side-by-side, as they so often did, they must have appeared a perfectly mismatched vaudevillian duo. Lincoln was six-feet-four-inches tall, thin, gaunt, and homely, with a reedy tenor voice that spoke in a soft Kentucky drawl. Douglas was a