Stephen A Douglas

Not sure if many of you are aware, but today is Mr. Douglas's birthday. Here is a man whose fingerprints are all over our nation’s history, but who seems to be relegated to the role of Lincoln's antagonist.
I am not a Douglas scholar by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I have not read a thing that centers on his life or his career. What I know about him I gathered from what was written about him in the books on the Civil War or Mr. Lincoln I've read. Which is a shame, such an historical figure should have a little brighter spotlight placed on him. His approach could be extremely divisive, but from what I read he was very loyal and patriotic and toward the end of the 1860 election worked incredibly hard at keeping this nation together. Now I'm not saying we should create a national holiday or anything like that. I feel (in my 21st century morality and hindsight) that many of the positions he took on the issues of the day lead us down the wrong moral and political path that brought us to the doorstep of civil war . I'm thinking maybe he and his thoughts and beliefs should be studied a bit more (even to teach us what not to do).
With that in mind, does anyone have a Douglas bio or historiography (outside of those dealing with the debates) that they would recommend on him? The only one that I am really aware of is Stephen A Douglas.

I liked The Long Pursuit: Abraham , which had quite a bit of very interesting biographical info about Douglas. It made me appreciate his rise to fame quite a bit. However, he was still responsible for some pretty bad legislation that lead to both the Civil War and bleeding Kansas, and he was a truly horrid racist. His work at keeping the Union together after the election was noble, but perhaps too little too late in regards to restoring what little honor he had left. (NOTE: I'm having a hard time getting that 'touchstone' to work with the complete title, so please click the link to see the complete title.)

Definitely looks intriguing.
I picked up The Impending Crisis and was paging through it reading the entries on Douglas and was surprised to learn that in the mid 1850s there was some scuttlebutt in the Republican Party about Mr. Douglas joining the party, and according to Potter, it was enough to worry Mr. Lincoln. Some in the party were openly courting him. Others, including Seward merely saw him as someone who had voted similarly on a few bills and was not made of true Republican cloth. How differently things would have played out if that would have happened. Heck, Abe could have just been a footnote in most history books if that would have played out. Who knows what the fate of the country would have been.
That is one of the things I love about research. Finding tidbits of info like that and thinking about their potential ramifications. They are endless. Keeps things interesting.

You have mentioned the three Touchstone Works concerning Stephen A. Douglas but if you search Stephen A. Douglas as the title in LT you get another five or six independent books on Douglas and if you go search the Library of Congress catalog for Stephen A. Douglas in the title you get many more.

Some in New York (Horace Greeley, mainly, I believe) suggested Douglas as a Republican candidate, but Lincoln responded by asking if they Easterners were so willing to sacrifice all the true Republicans in Illinois. Promoting Douglas as a Republican may have left more than Lincoln as a footnote in history - it may have left the Republicans as such too, for, despite Douglas' disagreements with the Buchanan administration, his attitude towards slavery still did not match what the Republicans had been fighting for since they had come into existince. Both the Republicans and Douglas greatly disliked the Buchanan administration, but the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" cliche did not fit, in this instance.