The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the cause of Trumbull's return to an active participation in politics. The prime mover in that disastrous adventure was Stephen A. Douglas, who had been Trumbull's predecessor in the office of secretary of state and also one of his predecessors on the supreme bench. He was now a Senator of the United States, and a man of world-wide celebrity. Born at Brandon, Vermont, in 1813, he had lost his father before he was a year old. His mother removed with him to Canandaigua, New York, where he attended an academy and read law to some extent in the office of a local practitioner. At the age of twenty, he set out for the West to seek his fortune, and he found the beginnings of it at Winchester, Illinois, where he taught school for a living and continued to study law, as Trumbull was doing at the same time at Greenville, Georgia. He was admitted to the bar in 1834. In 1835, he was elected state's attorney. Two years later he was elected a member of the legislature by the Democrats of Morgan County, and resigned the office he then held in order to take the new one. In 1837, he was appointed by President Van Buren register of the land office at Springfield. In the same year he was nominated for Congress in the Springfield district before he had reached the legal age, but was defeated by the Whig candidate, John T. Stuart, by 35 votes in a total poll of 36,742.[15] In 1840, he was appointed secretary of state, and in 1841, elected a judge of the supreme court under the circumstances already mentioned. In 1843, he was elected to the lower house of Congress and was reëlected twice, but before taking his seat the third time he was chosen by the legislature, in 1846, Senator of the United States for the term beginning March 4, 1847, and was reëlected in 1852. In Congress he had taken an active part in the annexation of Texas, in the war with Mexico, in the Oregon Boundary dispute, and in the Land Grant for the Illinois Central Railway. In the Senate he held the position of Chairman of the Committee on Territories. In the Democratic party he had forged to the front by virtue of boldness in leadership, untiring industry, boundless ambition, and self-confidence, and horse-power. He had a large head surmounted by an abundant mane, which gave him the appearance of a lion prepared to roar or to crush his prey, and not seldom the resemblance was confirmed when he opened his mouth on the hustings or in the Senate Chamber. As stump orator, senatorial debater, and party manager he never had a superior in this country. Added to these gifts, he had a very attractive personality and a wonderful gift for divining and anticipating the drift of public opinion. The one thing lacking to make him a man "not for an age but for all time," was a moral substratum. He was essentially an opportunist. Although his private life was unstained, he had no conception of morals in politics, and this defect was his undoing as a statesman.