Known as the "Little Giant," Stephen Douglas was one of the most important figures in the Democratic Party in the mid-nineteenth century. Born in 1813 in Vermont, Douglas had amassed an impressive political resume by the time he moved to Chicago in 1847. He had been a state's attorney, judge, an Illinois state representative, and a U.S. congressman-- all before his thirty-fifth birthday. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1846.

Douglas supported the "Young America" movement, which promoted American expansion into western territories. Expansion and slavery went hand in hand though, and Douglas spent much of his career trying to find compromises between people who wanted slavery outlawed in new territories and others who wanted it legalized—a group that included the majority of southern Democrats. Douglas, fearful that this disagreement could result in sectional conflict, argued that the people living in the territories should decide for themselves. Ultimately, the issue ended up dividing the Democratic Party. Frustrated northern Democrats who wanted free labor, not slave labor, to shape the future of the west abandoned ship and helped to form the new Republican Party. Meanwhile, a faction of southern Democrats pushed for secession in the event of a Republican presidential victory, which they feared could lead to the complete abolition of slavery in the U.S. Abraham Lincoln and Stephan Douglas focused on the slavery extension issue in their famous 1858 debates.

Douglas earned the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1860. He ran against and ultimately lost to Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, but supported Lincoln and the Union cause when the slavery issue finally exploded into Civil War.

Douglas would never learn the outcome of the war. He died in 1861 at age forty eight and was buried in a meadow on the edge of his Chicago property. The famed sculptor Leonard Volk, whose career Douglas had supported, designed the statue at Douglas' Tomb.

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