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In the Election of 1860, the Democratic Party split into two parties, the Northern Democratic Party and the Southern Democratic Party. By the late 1850s, the Democratic Party was split over the issue of slavery. Northern Democrats generally opposed slavery's expansion while many Southern Democrats believed that slavery should exist across the United States. In the presidential election of 1860, the Democratic Party split in two, with Stephen Douglas running for the Northern Democratic Party, and John C. Breckinridge representing the Southern Democratic Party. Two other political parties competed in this election as well. One of these parties was the Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln as its candidate. Lincoln and the Republican Party opposed slavery's expansion. The other party was the Constitutional Union Party. The party's candidate, John Bell, hoped to compromise the differences between the North and South by extending the Missouri Compromise line across the remainder of the United States. Slavery would be permitted in new states established south of the line, while the institution would be illegal in new states formed north of the line. The Northern and Southern Democratic Parties only officially existed in the election of 1860. Lincoln won the election against the other three candidates. Many Northern voters agreed with him that slavery should not expand. These people also generally agreed with Lincoln that the federal government could not end slavery where it already existed but that it could prohibit slavery in new territories and states. In 1860, the North had a population of approximately twenty-three million people to the South's nine million. Southerners divided their support between Breckinridge and Bell, while Northerners generally rejected these two candidates. Douglas provided the only real opposition to Lincoln in the North, but most Northern voters preferred Lincoln's views. With such a wide difference in population totals, the North controlled the Electoral College and gave Lincoln the victory in the election. With Lincoln's election, Southern states began to secede from the Union. Many Southerners believed that Lincoln would end slavery within the United States. Eleven Southern states seceded from the Union between December 1860 and June 1861, creating the Confederate States of America and beginning the American Civil War. Following the Civil War, the Democratic Party reunited, but Democrats residing in the South sometimes advanced different goals for their party than Democrats from the North. Some Northern Democrats fought for the rights of the working class against business owners and other industrialists while other Northern Democrats defended commerce and industry. Many Southern Democrats, especially in the years immediately following the Civil War, sought to protect rural and agricultural interests. Some Southern Democrats also worked to enact laws that denied African Americans equal rights. See AlsoReferences
The Democratic Party began its convention in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, 1860. The incumbent president, James Buchanan, was a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had Southern sympathies but opposed secession. Due to a largely disastrous administration, he had no interest in reelection; still, the Democrats, and Stephen A. Douglas in particular, were favored to win the election. Douglas was a moderate who advocated “popular sovereignty,” or the right of territories and newly admitted states to decide for themselves the question of slavery. His challenge at the convention was to placate the so-called fire-eaters of the party’s Deep South wing—who pressed for a strong proslavery platform and threatened secession if they did not get it—while avoiding the appearance that these radicals held him hostage, which would have hurt his support among Northerners. Despite fractious debate, Douglas’s supporters had nearly passed their platform by the third day. But events turned sharply. William Lowndes Yancey, a staunch secessionist from Alabama, addressed the convention and invoked the specter of John Brown in a passionate rejection of “Northern violence.” Yancey, along with Edmund Ruffin of Virginia and Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, forcefully argued that John Brown’s Raid in October 1859 had revealed the North’s true intention to dominate the South and forcibly emancipate enslaved African Americans. Southern radicals called for a federal slave code that would guarantee slaveholders’ rights, and for protections for slavery in western territories. The Douglas wing of the party realized that such provocative tactics would alienate moderate Northern voters and drive them to the Republicans. Douglas’s supporters rejected the proposal. Fifty Southern delegates left the convention in protest.  Virginia’s Democratic delegation, while sympathizing with the fire-eaters, still largely opposed the secessionists’ tactics. The exception was former governor Henry A. Wise, who vehemently pushed for a more radical stance while jockeying with his rival, state senator Robert M. T. Hunter, for a shot at the nomination. With Virginians edging toward more strident ground, members of the Deep South wing of the party undoubtedly felt more comfortable walking out of the convention, and indeed, most of the Virginia delegation followed them. The remaining Virginians hoped for compromise; however, the damage was done. After fifty-seven ballots, Douglas remained fifty votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for nomination, and on May 3 the convention adjourned. “Perhaps even now, the pen of the historian is nibbed to write the story of a new revolution,” Yancey told a crowd of his supporters during a nighttime rally in Charleston’s courthouse square. The Democrats reconvened in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 18, 1860, and again the fire-eaters—this time numbering 110 delegates—walked out, allowing the convention eventually to nominate Douglas. The radicals, bolstered by a cohort of Upper South delegates, formed their own convention, also in Baltimore. This so-called Seceder’s Convention nominated the U.S. vice president, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The Virginia delegation, like the party itself, split between the Northern and Southern factions. Republican PartyThe Republican Party entered its Chicago, Illinois, convention as a decided underdog. Having fielded only one previous presidential candidate, John C. Frémont in 1856, the party sought to corral an unwieldy collection of former Whigs, Free Soilers—those who accepted slavery where it already existed while opposing its expansion—and outright abolitionists. Most Republicans were resigned to the reality of the South’s “peculiar institution”; nevertheless, they faced a barrage of accusations from Democrats that their antislavery views fomented violence. Douglas blamed Republicans for incidents like John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Fire-eaters like Ruffin called for retaliation against abolitionists before they attacked the South again, and the magazine editor James D. B. DeBow wrote that the North “has sanctioned and applauded theft, murder, treason, and at the hands of our Northern Brethren, has shed Southern Blood on Southern soil! There is—there can be no peace!” Under the circumstances, it hardly mattered that the Republicans and their early front-runner, U.S. senator William H. Seward of New York, had repudiated Brown and Harpers Ferry. In the lead-up to the convention, Seward found himself weakened by corruption scandals and a reputation for being too radical on the question of slavery. (The radicals, meanwhile, were unimpressed by his move to the center.) In an October 1858 speech in Rochester, New York, he had famously called this political battle “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will sooner or later become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.” Lower North moderates heard talk of war in those words and looked for an alternative. They found it in Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, an articulate moderate who might also bring the West with him in an election. On May 16, 1860, he was nominated on the third ballot. In Virginia, Republicans enjoyed only miniscule support, largely in the western portion of the state; indeed, Virginia’s “Black Republicans” found themselves ostracized and relentlessly attacked. The lonely but outspoken cadre held its convention at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), in the far northwestern corner of the state, early in May. Delegates railed against the political domination by the “slave capitalists” of the Tidewater region. They also pointed to the disparity wrought by tax laws that favored wealthy, slave-owning planters over middling farmers, artisans, and urban laborers, but nonetheless stopped short of advocating abolition. The party’s devotion to unionism, however, was resolute. Constitutional Union PartyWith the Democrats deeply divided, and the Republicans struggling to shore up their credentials as a responsible choice in difficult times, a third party joined the fray. The Constitutional Unionists’ primary concern, as their name suggests, was the preservation of the Union. This new, conservative party counted several prominent Virginians among its ranks, including Alexander H. H. Stuart, John Minor Botts, and William C. Rives. Constitutional Unionists convened at Baltimore, on May 9, 1860, and wrote a platform only two paragraphs long. Ignoring the slavery question altogether, it instead emphasized “the Constitution, the Union, and the Laws.” The convention nominated John Bell, the well-respected former U.S. senator from Tennessee who benefited from significant support in the Border States. Still, the Constitutional Unionists faced little chance of success. Campaign and ElectionAs the four candidates vied for votes, the campaign became a bitter one. Throughout the year, tensions rose as many observers increasingly recognized the potential for civil war should the Republicans prevail. Lincoln, for his part, attempted to assure voters that he had no intention of interfering with Southern slavery, even embracing colonization for freed blacks. The Republican platform explicitly rejected “any lawless invasion … of any state or territory.” Despite Lincoln’s arguments, however, the Democratic press successfully painted him as a wild-eyed fanatic bent on Southern domination, calling to mind the potent image of John Brown. The charges stuck; Lincoln did not carry a single Southern state. He was not even on the ballot in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. In Virginia, a majority of voters supported solidly Unionist candidates, despite the best efforts of Edmund Ruffin and Henry Wise. These two men lobbied hard for the stridently proslavery Breckinridge, and severely attacked each of the other candidates. Democratic governor John Letcher, meanwhile, remained a Douglas supporter. Letcher, who took office in January 1860, believed both that the senator was the legitimate Democratic candidate and that he held the party’s only chance for success. The secessionists realized that the Democrats’ split doomed them to failure. In fact, many in their ranks hoped that the subsequent Republican victory would force the slave states to move toward secession. Especially in the Border States of Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, where geography and large populations made them critical players in the politics of disunion, the 1860 election heightened tensions. As fears continued to rise that a Lincoln victory would indeed bring about a civil war, even Letcher followed the example of his predecessor, Henry Wise, in stockpiling weapons and matériel for the Virginia militia. Against this tense backdrop, Virginians narrowly supported Constitutional Unionist John Bell with forty-four percent of the vote. Bell received 74,481 votes, in comparison to 74,325 for Breckinridge and 16,198 for Douglas. Lincoln won fewer than 2,000 votes. Lincoln’s national victory provoked the secession crisis, just as many radical Southerners had hoped, and moderate Virginians feared. Breckinridge’s close second proved to be a harbinger of future events. Virginia seceded a few days after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. TIMELINE October 16—18, 1859 John Brown and twenty-one raiders attack Harpers Ferry and capture the U.S. Arsenal there in an attempt to start a slave rebellion. Five men are killed (four white and one black). Ninety United States Marines, under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, capture Brown, who is December 2, 1859 After a gripping trial held in Charles Town in which John Brown is found guilty of conspiracy, of inciting servile insurrection, and of treason against the state, he is hanged. April 23, 1860 The Democratic Party's national convention meets in Charleston, South Carolina. When moderates supporting U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois clash with the party's radical Deep South wing, the latter group walks out. May 3, 1860 At the Democratic Party's national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, moderate supporters of U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas are unable to muster the necessary two-thirds majority for his nomination, even after fifty Deep South delegates walk out. The convention adjourns. May 9, 1860 The Constitutional Union Party, composed largely of former Whigs and Unionist Democrats, convenes its national convention in Baltimore, Maryland. The new party nominates John Bell of Tennessee to run for U.S. president. May 16, 1860 The Republican Party's national convention meets in Chicago, Illinois. Though U.S. senator William H. Seward of New York is the front-runner going into the convention, the delegates select the moderate Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. June 18, 1860 After Deep South delegates walk out of the Democratic Party's national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, the party reconvenes in Baltimore, Maryland. The so-called fire-eaters walk out again, splitting the party in two. November 6, 1860 Abraham Lincoln, a Republican from Illinois, is elected U.S. president. He wins 1 percent of the vote in Virginia. While John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party wins the state overall, the Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge wins the trans-Allegheny counties of western Virginia. FURTHER READING
CITE THIS ENTRY APA Citation:McClure, John. United States Presidential Election of 1860. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/united-states-presidential-election-of-1860.MLA Citation:McClure, John. "United States Presidential Election of 1860" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 19 Aug. 2022Which party split in the election of 1860?The split in the Democratic party is sometimes held responsible for Lincoln's victory despite the fact that Lincoln won the election with less than 40% of the popular vote, as much of the anti-Republican vote was "wasted" in Southern states in which no ballots for Lincoln were circulated.
Which political party was divided on the issue of slavery?The Northern Democratic Party was a leg of the Democratic Party during the 1860 presidential election, when the party split in two factions because of disagreements over slavery.
Which groups opposed the spread of slavery during the 1860 presidential election?The 1860 Republican Party convention in Chicago created a platform that clearly opposed the expansion of slavery in the West and the reopening of the slave trade.
What platform did the Republican Party run on in the election of 1860?The 1860 Republican platform consisted of 17 declarations of principle, of which 10 dealt directly with the issues of free soil principles, slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the preservation of the Union, while the remaining 7 dealing with other issues.
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During the presidential election of 1860, which political party was divided on the issue of slavery?
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