This particular Democratic National Convention was all about slavery — and how to keep it alive

The only thing bickering northern and southern Democrats disagreed on was the extent to which individual states would uphold slavery

Slaves of the rebel Gen. Thomas F. Drayton, South Carolina, 1862. Arguments at the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston centered on the practice of slavery and its proliferation. (Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

South Carolina Institute Hall was filled with the chatter of dissent. Northern and Southern Democrats were gathered at the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina on April 23, 1860 to nominate Stephen Douglas of Illinois as the party’s presidential candidate. But ferocious arguing over the party’s slavery platform caused the Fire-Eaters, a group of pro-slavery Southerners who advocated for secession, to walk out.

Both Northern and Southern Democrats were staunchly anti-abolitionist. The problem was that Northern Democrats supported Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine, which stated that federal law wouldn’t protect slavery in any territory the people didn’t want it. Southern Democrats seethed at the thought of it. They wanted a law that allowed slave masters to “employ” the enslaved however they chose.

Left: Scene at the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston. | Right: Senator Stephen A. Douglas, author of the Freeport Doctrine. (Library of Congress)

Republicans accepted slavery where it was already legal, but were against its expansion. Southern Fire-Eaters saw little difference between Douglas’s plan and the Republicans and demanded the party platform be upheld: essentially that the government have no power whatsoever to abolish or interfere with slavery.

Northern delegates refused to get on board. The Fire-Eaters were the majority on the convention’s planning committee. When they stormed out, Douglas didn’t have two-thirds of the vote that he needed to confirm the nomination, so the delegates agreed to reconvene in Baltimore in June. In Baltimore, the Democrats successfully nominated Douglas as their party’s candidate. But Douglas would lose to the Republicans’ candidate — Abraham Lincoln.

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