This county, established March 8, 1858, and organized June 15, 1866, was named in honor of Stephen Arnold Douglas, statesman and leader in the Democratic Party, eminent in his patriotic loyalty to the Union at the beginning of the Civil War. He was born in Brandon, Vt., April 23, 1813, and died in Chicago, June 3, 1861. He lived in Vermont to the age of 17 years; studied law and was admitted to practice in Illinois in 1834; was elected to the state legislature in 1835 and won there the sobriquet of "the Little Giant," by which he was ever afterward well known; was elected a judge of the state supreme court in 1841; was a member of Congress, 1843-47; and U.S. senator, 1847-61. On the application of Minnesota to be admitted as a state in 1857-58, Douglas earnestly advocated it, being then chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories.

In a series of debates in Illinois in 1858 with Abraham Lincoln, his Republican opponent, nominated for the U.S. senate, Douglas defended his view that Congress had no authority for exclusion of slavery from territories not yet received into the Union as states. Each of these great political leaders then aroused extraordinary interest throughout the nation, and two years later they were opposing candidates for the presidency; Lincoln was elected. The southern states seceded, and in 1861 the great Civil War began.

Several biographies of Douglas have been published, in the presidential campaign of 1860, again new editions of one of these in the midst of the Civil War and at its close, and more complete and dispassionate studies in recent years. The influence of his loyalty for preservation of the Union was an inestimable contribution to the making of history and the welfare of the world.