No requests to take down Ottawa’s Douglas statue

A statue of Stephen A. Douglas outside the Illinois State Capitol is expected to come down and be placed in storage this fall.

That won’t be the case in Ottawa.

City officials have had no inquiries about removing the depiction of Douglas at Washington Square, Mayor Dan Aussem said.

The statues represent different things.

The statue in Springfield is a lone depiction of Douglas, a notable 19th century lawmaker in Illinois who profited from slavery.

The monument in Ottawa commemorates the site of the first of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 that put Abraham Lincoln on a national stage and sparked his presidential election two years later. Statues of Douglas and Lincoln are erected side by side at the center of Ottawa’s Washington Square fountain to depict the site of the debate.

Douglas’ statue is one of many monuments, from Confederate generals to Christopher Columbus, to come down following the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, according to the Associated Press.

Aussem said City Hall has not had a single request to remove Douglas’ statue.

“No one’s asked about it,” he said. “It’s a historical tribute. That’s what happened.”

Each of the 1858 debate sites, from Freeport to Jonesboro, including Ottawa, memorializes the men – most with full-size statues.

“Dismantling those or taking down just Douglas would sort of erase one of the most important political discussions ever held in the country,” Harold Holzer said to the Associated Press. Holzer is a Lincoln Prize winner and Civil War expert at Hunter College in New York.

Curt Bedei, executive director of the Ottawa Visitors Center, agreed about the statues’ historical significance.

He said Ottawa receives at least a couple visitors a week asking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Ottawa participates in the state’s Looking for Lincoln tourism promotion, which also has a passport, allowing visitors to collect stamps from important sites. Bedei said the passport is a popular promotion. He said he recently had someone from New York stop into the visitors center inquiring about the Lincoln-Douglas history.

“Everybody knows Lincoln,” Bedei said.

“The debate was significant, and it was a spectacle. It attracted reporters from coast to coast. ... And it happened here in Ottawa.”

The seven Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 were for an Illinois Senate seat, but they focused on the expansion of slavery before the Civil War.

Douglas retained a 20% share of a family-owned, 200-slave Mississippi plantation that led Illinois’ House speaker Michael Madigan in July to recommend removing Douglas’ likenesses from the Statehouse, according to the Associated Press.

Ottawa also has a mural commemorating a scene from the Lincoln-Douglas debate on a north-facing wall along Jackson Street.