Stephen A. Douglas the Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1843

Mr. Ankrom is definitely in a niche no one else is occupying. Stephen Douglas is now historically viewed as a necessary sideshow to the mythos of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, one cannot fully understand Lincoln without understanding Douglas and his interaction with Lincoln, and this book does a good job elucidating facts about that often adversarial relationship.

The scholarship is thorough, and there are tidbits of information in here that I had not seen elsewhere. Different astronomical and physical phenomena are mentioned in the telling of Douglas's story. Likewise, there is some not well-known or discussed matters where Douglas and Mary Todd are concerned.

What I found made this book harder to read for me, however, was a lack of a strong narrative voice from Mr. Ankrom. It is not that there is no narration. Indeed, one might suggest that the majority of the book is narration. The missing piece to which I refer is a strong position or thesis concerning Douglas. I understand well from reading the book what Mr. Douglas did and who he was, but I did not develop much of a sense of how that related to Mr. Ankrom. There is little by way of analysis from the author concerning Douglas in the sense of developing a full opinion one way or another concerning his character.

Rather, there is a feeling that Douglas is being kept "at a distance" as something to be studied, but from which conclusions may not be firmly drawn. We known that Douglas historically kept the position that slavery should be decided by the people as a relative moral value. Lincoln, on the other hand, we know suggested that slavery was a morally non-relative matter and therefore not decidable by the people. Likewise, we learn Douglas does much by way of political maneuvers for self-promotion. Many of these tricks work. What we do not learn from Mr. Ankrom is how that influences his analysis of Douglas's character.

Because the author is missing this critical piece, it makes the book harder to read because though the facts are many, it is though we are being told them by a figure shrouded in fog in a back alley somewhere. We can appreciate the information, it is just difficult to understand the bias of the source since the source does not actually take a position. This, is perhaps, the most telling when it comes to bias.It is impossible to remain completely neutral especially when one's subject matter is as polarizing as Douglas.

Thus, I would say this book is a very good read on a figure who does not have many biographies written.However, I would also say that it may be that those lack of biographies exist because nobody wanted to have to develop the thesis in relation to the subject matter. Douglas was racist beyond any doubt. He was highly self-promotional and extremely cunning. He re-arranged things to benefit his version of Jacksonian Democracy, which for him, was highly self-promotional. He was from the northeast, where slavery had been mostly a non-issue for quite some time. He came west, and tried to pretend he came from Kentucky. In short, he was very good at managing his image and creating impressions to his own benefit. While Mr. Ankrom covers these facts, the final words of "The Voice of the People and the Voice of God" in latin is Douglas's quote summarizing everything in the book. Of course, the entire book argues against this fact by example. The civil war was fought and Lincoln was sacrificed because sometimes the voice of the people can be wrong. Mr. Ankrom, however, does not delve into these waters. Why?