Knox County Courthouse

The old Knox County Courthouse in Knoxville is where the Little Giant practiced being a judge. Stephen A. Douglas held court on the second floor of the 1839 brick building from 1841 to 1843 — riding the circuit as district judge before the Senate, before the Kansas-Nebraska Act, before the debates that broke the Democratic Party. The building's Doric columns are plaster-fluted local brick — the county's seat until 1873, when the railroad town of Galesburg took the honor and left Knoxville with the older history.

The county's other claim is the debate itself — the fifth Lincoln-Douglas meeting happened at Knox College in Galesburg in October 1858, on the grounds of the abolitionist college the county had grown around the courthouse. Lincoln chose Galesburg to declare that slavery was a moral question, not merely a political one: 'He is blowing out the moral lights around us who contends that whoever wants slaves has the right to hold them.' The judge who had presided over the county's courts stood on the college platform arguing that the territories could choose; the lawyer who would replace him argued that some things cannot be chosen.

The courthouse is a Network to Freedom site — the building's documented history includes the county's connection to the Underground Railroad work that ran through the region's abolitionist communities. Knoxville kept the old courthouse when the seat moved; Galesburg kept Old Main. Between them is the county where Douglas the judge became Douglas the debater — and lost the argument that elected Lincoln.

The Knox County Courthouse is the archive's judge's-bench file — the 1839 building where Stephen Douglas presided before he was famous, in the county where the fifth debate would later declare slavery a moral question he could not dodge.