Stephen A. Douglas is not a well-respected figure in American history. Known more for his famous rivalry with Abraham Lincoln than any of his senatorial or judicial accomplishments, Douglas is often consigned to play the role of a foil in stories about the Railsplitter’s meteoric rise to the presidency. When historians and political scientists give him more attention than that, his reputation suffers even more for his indifference to slavery and openly racist remarks.

In his new book, Chorus of the Union, Chicago historian Edward Robert McClelland offers readers a different picture of the “Little Giant.” Rather than presenting a caricature of Douglas as a cartoonish villain, McClelland treats him as a complex historical figure attempting to navigate the heady winds of antebellum politics. The Douglas that emerges from this account is something of a confused patriot, genuinely dedicated to the Union but mistaken about the best way to save it.

Douglas’s muddled Unionism can teach Americans something about the difficulties of our present political moment. Although the issues of our day are nowhere near as fundamental as those raised by slavery in the period leading up to the Civil War, we are, unfortunately, witnessing a rise in extremism and violence that bears something of a resemblance to the chaos Douglas and Lincoln faced. By looking back with McClelland at their rivalry and efforts to save the Union without war, contemporary Americans can perhaps come to understand something about the statesmanship we need in our own time.

McClelland rightly begins by depicting Douglas as a frontier populist. After he first moved to Illinois from the Northeast, Douglas wrote to his brother in 1833 that he became “a Western man … imbib[ing] Western feelings, principles, and interests, and … selected Illinois as my favorite place of adoption, without any desire of returning to the land of my fathers except as a visitor.” For him, the project of settling West represented futurity itself—all of the republic’s hopes for progress depended on the prosperity of places like Illinois.

Douglas linked this Western regionalism with a dedication to Jacksonian Democracy. As Robert Johannsen put it in his magisterial biography, Andrew Jackson’s populism was Stephen Douglas’s “guiding star.” He genuinely wanted to be a friend to the common man, and fought against interventionist Whig economic policies on the grounds that they benefited Eastern elites at the expense of the working folk. Even his ideas about frontier expansion and foreign relations could be tied back to a Jacksonian vision of a democratic republic standing against haughty aristocrats and their retrograde forms of government.

It was in defense of this ideological structure that Douglas tried to stake out a “popular sovereignty” position on the slavery question. McClelland describes Illinois as “a buffer of extremes between North and South” and “equally hostile to abolitionism and slavery extension.” For Douglas, extremists of both sides threatened the great Union that Jackson defended in the Nullification Crisis. Putting the slavery question into the hands of the people of the states and territories themselves presented what he considered a deeply democratic solution to the great divisions of the 1850s.

Douglas strove to frame this “popular sovereignty” solution in constitutional terms. In a September 1859 essay titled “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority,” he argued that the Founders fought the Revolution to secure the “inestimable right of Local Self-Government,” and that a strict interpretation of the Constitution they framed could not possibly give Congress a right to legislate on the question of slavery in territories. “The idea is repugnant to the spirit and genius of our complex system of government,” he wrote, “because it effectually blots out the dividing line between Federal and Local authority which forms an essential barrier for the defense of the independence of the States and the liberties of the people against Federal invasion.” In Douglas’s view, the antislavery position Lincoln and his allies took was radically undemocratic and portended civil war.

One of the ironies of Douglas’s position, though, is that subjecting the slavery question to popular sovereignty could only further inflame the issue. The territories were not yet states precisely because they did not possess the institutions or traditions necessary for self-government. Unlike the thirteen original colonies, these places lacked centuries of experience to prepare them for genuine deliberation. Douglas’s Jacksonian priors blinded him to the ways the territories’ political immaturity could be exploited by radicals.

If Douglas believed that federal neutrality towards slavery was essential to preserving the Union, Lincoln believed slaveholders would use that neutrality to pervert the Union. As McClelland puts it, Lincoln couched “his opposition to slavery not in abolitionist terms, but as defense against the tyranny, violence, and intolerance of the ‘Slave Power.’” He understood what Douglas did not: slavery as an economic system created a powerful set of interests that would conspire in every realm to extend its power. The “Slave Power” was not simply trying to control the legality of slavery as such, but rather attempting to manipulate federal policy, foreign and domestic, to stretch its domain across the entire Western Hemisphere. And in the 1850s, the Slave Power’s project had grown to threaten the regime itself.

Lincoln therefore rejected Douglas’s type of neutralism. He believed the Union existed to preserve more than peaceful coexistence among the states. Instead, he asserted that the Union had a “philosophical cause” announced in the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal.” It was in their October 7, 1858, debate at Galesburg that Lincoln set forth the clearest version of his case against Douglas:

And I do think—I repeat, though I said it on a former occasion—that Judge Douglas, and whoever, like him, teaches that the negro has no share, humble though it may be, in the Declaration of Independence, is going back to the era of our liberty and independence, and, so far as in him lies muzzling the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return; that he is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; that he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.

Far from upholding the original intent of the Founders, Lincoln believed that Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” doctrine was a harmful innovation that would undo the purpose of the Constitution altogether. Lincoln and Douglas certainly had competing accounts of the proper constitutional status of slavery, but ultimately through their debates, Lincoln turned the question into first and foremost a moral issue. Douglas’s populism and desire for general social concord had turned him into at best a useful tool of the “Slave Power,” and at worst a willing co-conspirator in their schemes to extend slavery into the West.

Needless to say, Douglas was incensed at Lincoln’s accusations. McClelland spends much of the first half of the book reconstructing the campaigns for the Senate and the presidency that pitted the two men and their constitutional views against each other. He retraces not only their bitter arguments over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott v. Sanford, but also the dirty tricks each prairie politician used to one-up the other. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates were anything but civil.

Douglas hit his lowest point in the final debate at Alton. Glaring at Lincoln, he thundered:

He says that he looks forward to a time when slavery shall be abolished everywhere. I look forward to the time when each State shall be allowed to do as it pleases. If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is not my business, but its own; if it chooses to abolish slavery, it is its own business, not mine. I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom. I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Union; I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed.

Even with this shameful articulation of white supremacy, though, Douglas was maintaining the vital importance of the Union. He truly believed that Lincoln’s doctrines, combined with the agitation of abolitionists and other anti-slavery activists, would lead to an unimaginable crisis—civil war, or perhaps even genocide. McClelland demonstrates that in all the sound and fury, Douglas was motivated by a genuine concern for the “perpetuity of this Union,” misguided as he seems to most Americans at the distance of 150 years.

Although Douglas won the Illinois Senate seat in 1858, the debates propelled Lincoln into national stardom and set the two men up for another confrontation in the 1860 presidential election. This is where McClelland’s narrative truly shines. He documents the campaign from its early skirmishes in Ohio to the disastrous 1860 Democratic convention in Charleston, South Carolina, and Lincoln’s triumphant Cooper Union address. Through it all, he makes it clear that Lincoln and Douglas were engaged in a fierce debate about the nature of the Union itself, flanked by pro- and anti-slavery radicals who were apostles of disunion willing to (in the words of one Fire-Eater quoted by McClelland) “tread a pathway in blood.”

In the end, Lincoln won in 1860 because Douglas’s campaign was hobbled by divisions within the Democratic Party itself. As John Andrew, a Republican and the future governor of Massachusetts put it at the time, “The Republican party is … the only united national party in America. … It is the only party in the nation which stands by the Union and holds no secessionist in its ranks.” Fire-Eaters in the South split away from Douglas despite his claim that he alone could save the Union, and without their support, he did not have the votes to stop Lincoln from winning the White House.

By October 1860, the election’s outcome was clear. But Douglas did not consider his duty done; McClelland reports that on October 9 he told his secretary, “Mr. Lincoln is the next president. We must try to save the Union. I will go south.” He spent the last two weeks of the campaign barnstorming the states that would eventually secede and become the Confederacy, in the hopes of persuading moderate Union men to prevent the breakup of the nation itself.

“The election of no man on Earth, by the people, according to the Constitution,” Douglas told a crowd in Memphis, “is a cause of breaking up this government.” Despite how much he disagreed with Lincoln and even despised his party, Douglas believed that secession was an unacceptable attack on America herself. “There is no evil of which any man complains for which disunion would furnish a remedy, but, on the contrary, it would be aggravated by disunion,” he went on to say. “I hold, further, that there is no evil in this country for which the Constitution and laws will not furnish a remedy.”

Douglas sadly could not persuade Southerners that secession was an unwise policy or prevent the outbreak of the Civil War. No speech he gave could convince the secessionists to stay in the Union, nor could he work out any policy compromise that would put either side at ease. But his struggle to find a solution was noble, and deserves greater memorialization than it has received. As McClelland shows, Douglas demonstrated that he was a thoroughgoing Union man and a true patriot in this moment of darkest crisis.

When the war actually broke out at Fort Sumter in April 1861, Douglas threw his support wholeheartedly behind Lincoln. “If I were president, I’d convert or hang all the traitors within forty-eight hours,” he told a friend. And then McClelland reports he said, “I have known Mr. Lincoln a longer time than you have, or the country has; he will come out alright, and we will all stand by him.” In the opening months of the war, Douglas did everything he could to shore up the Union and prepare it for the shock of secession.

Douglas himself would not live to see the defeat of the rebellion. He worked himself to exhaustion campaigning for the presidency and then against secession, finally succumbing to illness on June 3, 1861. But Union victory in the Civil War depended on men like him. Countless thousands of Democrats nobly struggled to defeat the rebellion. Without their wartime support, Lincoln never could have held together his coalition in the North, let alone prevent the border states from joining the Confederacy. Douglas’s brave example set a pattern for the wartime “loyal opposition.”

The tragedy of Douglas’s life is that, despite all his efforts, he was unable to stop the coming of the war, and in many ways is often blamed for it. Yet McClelland concludes, “History remembers Lincoln and Douglas as antagonists, but they ended their relationship as allies, bonded, finally, by their shared belief in the Union.” He may not have affirmed every particular of Lincoln’s agenda, but he knew they loved the same country. Douglas is rarely memorialized as a great man, but in the bleakest hour this nation has ever faced he set aside his personal ambitions and ideological convictions to fight for a higher loyalty.

As Americans head to the polls in the coming months, it may seem that the Union loved by Lincoln and Douglas is fraying once again. Political rhetoric is becoming more heated by the day, and one candidate even survived an assassination attempt this summer. As important as the partisan issues at stake in the election are, the tragedy of the Sectional Crisis teaches us that the Union is the most precious of things. We should be inspired to save it once again by the examples of both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.