By Allen C. Guelzo What's in a name? A great deal, if it happens
to be Stephen A. Douglas. A hundred and fifty years ago, Stephen
Arnold Douglas was the most powerful politician in America. He
had begun his political career as a hyper-loyal Andrew Jackson
Democrat, snatched up one of Illinois' U.S. Senate seats in
1846, and rose from there to the heights of Congressional
stardom by helping the great Henry Clay cobble together the
Compromise of 1850 - which effectively averted civil war over
the expansion of slavery into the West for another decade. No
man was a more obvious presidential candidate than Douglas, and
in 1860, he won his party's nomination to the presidency. That,
unhappily for Douglas, was when the cheering stopped. He made
the magnificent mistake, when running for re-election to the
Senate in 1858, of agreeing to debate the new Republican party's
anti-slavery candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Although Douglas
managed to win the election, Lincoln handled him so
relentlessly, exposing the failure of Do