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- Towne SE. Worse than Vallandigham: Governor Oliver P. Morton, Lambdin P. Milligan, and the military arrest and trial of Indiana State Senator Alexander J. Douglas during the civil war. Indiana mag hist. 2010 Mar;106(1):1-39. See full article in my Articles database A6473.
Alexander J. Douglass was born in 1827 in Richland County, Ohio, near the town of Mansfield, the son of farmers. When Alexander was twelve, an attack of rheumatism crippled his father, rendering the older man unable to work. Alexander and his two younger brothers Thomas and Michael farmed the land to support their parents and two younger sisters. When not busy farming, Alexander attended a local school in the winter. Reputed to be a voracious reader as a youth, he began to teach school locally at eighteen. He soon enrolled at a local academy (or high school) at nearby Ashland, and then at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio. It was at this time he dropped the second ?s? in his family name. Douglas intended to study for a career in law, but the college aimed to produce pastors for Lutheran congregations. Notwithstanding that he and his family were Presbyterians, Douglas studied for the Lutheran ministry. However, he failed his examination for the pastorate and did not graduate, as the examining committee was not satisfied by his answers to questions on accepted doctrine. His failure to receive full credentials did not hinder him from filling Lutheran pulpits for many years later in his life, nor from teaching in church schools up until his death. Shortly after leaving Wittenberg in 1850 he married Mary Jenner, of a prominent Richland County family.
Douglas?s failure to become a Lutheran pastor allowed him to revert to his earlier ambition to practice law. After teaching school for two years in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, he read law in the Mansfield firm of Samuel J. Kirkwood and Barnabas Burns. After three years of toil and study, Douglas passed the Ohio bar in 1855. The Douglas family resettled in Whitley County, Indiana, nearly due west of Richland County, Ohio, by about one-hundred-seventy miles. There the family grew, with a succession of children added to the couple. After teaching at the Wartburg Seminary, Douglas established a law practice in Columbia City and soon began to develop a name as an effective Democratic Party speaker and advocate. He won election as Whitley County prosecutor in1858, and played an active role in public affairs in the county and the surrounding region. Appointment as county school examiner followed. Later in that year he offered himself for his party?s choice for state representative, but came in third place in the candidate selection process. In addition to holding public offices, Douglas continued to teach at a local Lutheran school.
In common with a substantial minority of his fellow Democrats at the outset of war in 1861, Douglas voiced his decided opposition to federal coercion. Reacting to a pro-war sermon preached in a local Lutheran church, he announced in a long letter in Columbia City?s Democratic newspaper that he did not want ?blood on my garments.? A speech at a county party convention in September 1861 again embroiled him in dispute. While denying that he termed a recently recruited volunteer company a bunch of ?yellow legged abolitionists,? he admitted to having said that there was ?disloyalty in places where loyalty was pretended.? The denominational and oratorical controversies do not appear to have damaged his standing in the community, at least among the Democratic majority: Douglas won reappointment as county school examiner, and the newspaper reported that his private, Lutheran school enjoyed a large enrollment.
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