Reg Ankrom

T

he author of the anticipated three-volume biography of Stephen A. Douglas said it was Abraham Lincoln who introduced him to the 19th century Democratic politician  from Illinois. 

          Retiring from a career in the electric and natural gas utilitiy industry, Ankrom made a chance purchase of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln. He read it and was hooked. Ankrom said he has since read and added hundreds of histories and biographies to the shelves of what he calls his Lincoln Library. It is where his avocation in American history began.

          “More than 18,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln,” Ankrom said. “And as one who considers Lincoln our nation's greatest president and civil saint, I say, deservedly so. But I was surprised that so little attention had been given to the man Lincoln pursued, largely unsuccessfully, in politics for 26 years. I wanted to know more about Douglas.”

          And the more he learned, Ankrom said, the more he felt  compelled to write about him.

          “I thought I had learned enough to write a biography of Douglas,” Reg said. “As I worked on Apprenticeship, it became evident that I had enough to write a two-volume biography. Then three.”

          Ankrom is now working on the third and final volume, which he is calling “Stephen A. Douglas and Union, 1851-1861.”

          In his own life, Ankrom said he has walked some of the paths Douglas walked in Illinois. That, he said, added interest for him in Douglas. Ankrom was born and educated in Jacksonville, the place where the 20-year-old Douglas landed in November 1833, and the place from which Douglas launched his political career. Like Douglas, Ankrom lived in Springfield. Douglas served as federal land registrar there from March 1837 until his appointment in February 1841 as an associate justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. That position also made Douglas, then 27 years old, a circuit judge in the judicial district headquartered at Quincy, the Mississippi River town where Ankrom and his wife Jane live today.      

          In addition to his books, Ankrom’s avocation in history has produced more than a hundred historical articles, columns, and essays for journals, magazines, and newspapers. He also contributed to The Quincy Miracle: A Rescue Never To Be Forgotten. That book tells the story of what Ankrom believes is one of the nation’s greatest humanitarian efforts. Some 1,400 Quincy residents during the winter of 1838-39 provided refuge to 5,700 Latter Day Saints whom Governor Lilburn Boggs expelled from Missouri under a threat of extermination.

         A popular speaker, Ankrom has delivered talks on Douglas, Lincoln, slavery, and antebellum Illinois and American history.

          Ankrom earned his bachelor’s degree at Illinois College, founded in Jacksonville by New England abolitionists in 1829. Douglas and Lincoln frequented the campus of that college, oldest in Illinois. Ankrom earned his master’s degree from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the city sacked in the territory Douglas organized in 1854.

Author of
Stephen A. Douglas:
The Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1843

        and
Stephen A. Douglas, Western Man:
The Early Years in Congress, 1844-1850
                      
   McFarland and Co., Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina