He was a widower with two sons when he met Adèle Cutts, and, like many a less fortunate man, he was instantly impressed with her absolute loveliness. He would go to her direct from the Senate chamber while the whole city was ringing with the fame of his speeches, which she not infrequently heard from a place in the gallery, and throw all his irresistible eloquence into his courtship of her. In the Democratic Convention of the summer of 1856 Douglas and Buchanan were rival candidates for the Presidential nomination. Pierce, also, though there had been some doubt in the minds of his own townsmen about his making a successful President at all, was seeking the nomination for a second term. "Frank Pierce is all very well up here where he knows everybody and everybody knows Frank Pierce," said a New Hampshire sage during the summer preceding Pierce's election, "but when it comes to spreading him out over the whole country, I'm afraid he'll be mighty thin in some places." The thinness had evidently been apparent, for while he had the high honor of coming in almost unanimously, as Senator Benton said, he went out with as great a unanimity. When it became evident that the nomination was not for Douglas, so intensely was he beloved by the people of the West, and particularly by those of his own State, that many a sturdy, hard-featured delegate from that section, to all appearances the embodiment of stoicism, put down his head and wept like a little heart-broken child. On the 20th of November, a few weeks after the election of Buchanan, he was married to Adèle Cutts, and it has been said that, of the many beautiful women who witnessed the incoming of Buchanan's administration at his inaugural ball, Douglas's wife was the most beautiful. Already known to the South and the East, her fame now spread westward, and when it was rumored that Douglas would take her to Chicago, where he had maintained a legal residence for some years, the people of the town made ready to receive her with the enthusiasm which she inspired in them then primarily as the young wife of Stephen A. Douglas. She made her first appearance among them at St. Mary's Church, where many people who had never been in a Catholic church before were found in the congregation that Sunday morning, and far more than the usual external contingent waited patiently on the sidewalk to see her as she came out. When she appeared with her husband at the celebration held on the State line between Illinois and Wisconsin, in honor of the union of the two railroad companies between Chicago and Milwaukee, she was hailed with uproarious cheers. There was that in her very presence which seemed to completely satisfy every man's ideal of all womanly perfection.