A hasty sketch of the lives of Lincoln and Douglas before their speeches in Chicago in 1858 will show the typical western conditions which had put them in their leading positions. Douglas was forty-five years old, Lincoln four years older. Born in Brandon, Vermont, Stephen Arnold Douglas was the son of a young physician, whose father was Benajah Douglass,[3] a New York pioneer who had moved to Vermont and there been prominent in local politics, and whose mother was Martha Arnold, a descendant of Governor William Arnold of Rhode Island. Dr. Douglass had married Sally Fisk, the daughter of a prosperous farmer. He died when Stephen was very young, and the widow and children went to live with their mother’s bachelor brother on the Fisk farm. Here Stephen lived the life of a healthy Vermont boy until the marriage of his uncle and the birth of a son changed his standing in the family. When the boy began to propose going to Brandon Academy to prepare for college, his uncle told him kindly that he could not provide for his further education. Stephen in a fit of boyish anger left the farm and apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker in Middlebury. He stayed with him for a year, delighting in the novelty of the life and in the companionship with a group of young men with whom he could discuss politics and eulogize his favorite hero, Andrew Jackson; but, nevertheless, he grew weary of the humble position of apprentice. After two years with this man and with another cabinet-maker, he gave up the trade and returned to the home of his mother, enrolling himself at Brandon Academy. [3] The elder Douglass spelled his name with a double _s_. The marriage of his sister and later of his mother started the boy at the age of seventeen on his westward journeying. It put him into Canandaigua, New York, where he pursued his studies at its excellent academy for three years, and prepared for his later career by studying law out of school in the offices of local attorneys. The western fever was upon him, and life on one of the great channels of westward migration induced him in the spring of 1833, against the wishes of his relatives and friends, to start for Buffalo and the tempting world beyond.