If you have been paying attention to the Republican primaries, you may have heard Newt Gingrich state that he would follow President Obama around challenging him to debates patterned after the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. For those who don't remember their American history and for my overseas blogger friends who weren't aware of these debates, Wikipedia has a good article about these seven debates and their raising of Lincoln's national profile, culminating in his election to the Presidency in 1860.
But there is a strong North Carolina connection to the Illinois senator they called the "Little Giant" that I just found out about recently. While looking through a digital copy of a 1936 Federal Writers Project guide book on North Carolina for ideas of places to visit, I came across a snippet about Stephen Douglas' wife, Martha Martin Douglas, dying in childbirth in Washington, DC in 1853 and the senator and his family bringing her back to Reidsville (which is just 25 miles north of here) to bury her in the family cemetery.
Wondering how a senator in Illinois would meet a woman from the Piedmont of North Carolina, I found out that Douglas had sat next to her cousin, David Settle Reid, in the US House of Representatives who then introduced Douglas to Martha. They married at her father's plantation on the Dan River in Rockingham County (where Reidsville is located) and she returned to Illinois with him. A year after they married, her father died and left her the largest plantation in Mississippi along with 150 slaves. Some historians feel that this event colored Douglas' attitude about slavery and his vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
After Martha's death, Douglas went on to marry Adele Cutts, a great-niece of Dolley Payne Madison, James Madison's wife and another local connection as Dolley Madison was born here in Guilford County.
Anyway, I was fascinated by all these connections and decided to find the Settle family cemetery where Martha Douglas was buried. I figured that it would be really imposing with all sorts of expensive statuary and the like. After all, she was the daughter of one of the wealthiest plantation owners of the period, wife of a famous Illinois senator and the mother of a North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice, Robert Douglas and the great-granddaughter of Alexander Martin, one of the first governors of North Carolina after the Revolutionary War.
And this is what I found:
An abandoned cemetery. Martha Martin Douglas' tomb is that one to the immediate right of the picture. Doing a little more research, I found that the Settle family members (including the former ambassador to Peru in 1855) and been disinterred and removed to Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville years ago.
But here Martha remains, abandoned and forgotten even though her descendants live just 25 miles away here in Greensboro. Stephen Douglas, on the other hand, has a memorial city park and a ten-foot spire marking his tomb in Chicago.
But there is a strong North Carolina connection to the Illinois senator they called the "Little Giant" that I just found out about recently. While looking through a digital copy of a 1936 Federal Writers Project guide book on North Carolina for ideas of places to visit, I came across a snippet about Stephen Douglas' wife, Martha Martin Douglas, dying in childbirth in Washington, DC in 1853 and the senator and his family bringing her back to Reidsville (which is just 25 miles north of here) to bury her in the family cemetery.
Wondering how a senator in Illinois would meet a woman from the Piedmont of North Carolina, I found out that Douglas had sat next to her cousin, David Settle Reid, in the US House of Representatives who then introduced Douglas to Martha. They married at her father's plantation on the Dan River in Rockingham County (where Reidsville is located) and she returned to Illinois with him. A year after they married, her father died and left her the largest plantation in Mississippi along with 150 slaves. Some historians feel that this event colored Douglas' attitude about slavery and his vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
After Martha's death, Douglas went on to marry Adele Cutts, a great-niece of Dolley Payne Madison, James Madison's wife and another local connection as Dolley Madison was born here in Guilford County.
Anyway, I was fascinated by all these connections and decided to find the Settle family cemetery where Martha Douglas was buried. I figured that it would be really imposing with all sorts of expensive statuary and the like. After all, she was the daughter of one of the wealthiest plantation owners of the period, wife of a famous Illinois senator and the mother of a North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice, Robert Douglas and the great-granddaughter of Alexander Martin, one of the first governors of North Carolina after the Revolutionary War.
And this is what I found:
An abandoned cemetery. Martha Martin Douglas' tomb is that one to the immediate right of the picture. Doing a little more research, I found that the Settle family members (including the former ambassador to Peru in 1855) and been disinterred and removed to Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville years ago.
But here Martha remains, abandoned and forgotten even though her descendants live just 25 miles away here in Greensboro. Stephen Douglas, on the other hand, has a memorial city park and a ten-foot spire marking his tomb in Chicago.
