This was not only the new doctrine of the Supreme Court, but to it was superadded the further claim that the Constitution required Congress and all the departments of the government to protect the slaveholder with his slaves, when once in a Territory, against territorial legislation or other unfriendly acts. By this most startling doctrine the Constitution was to become an instrument to establish and protect slavery in all the territorial possessions of the Republic.
Douglas failed of nomination at Charleston for want of a two thirds vote of the entire convention as originally organized. The convention adjourned to meet, June 11th, at Baltimore, and the seceding branch of it also adjourned to meet at the same time at Richmond, but later it decided to meet with and again become a part of the convention at Baltimore. At this time the South had control of the Senate, and May 25, 1860, before the convention reassembled, and after a most acrimonious debate into which Douglas was drawn and in which Jefferson Davis bitterly assailed him, the resolutions of the latter were passed, affirming the "property" theory, with the new doctrine of constitutional protection of it in the Territories added.
The convention reassembled, and at the end of five days' wrangle and recrimination, during which the members called each other "disorganizers," "bolters," "traitors," "disunionists," "abolitionists," accompanied by violent threats, it disrupted again, its chairman, Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, led the bolters and was followed by the delegates generally from the Southern States. They organized at once a separate convention.
Douglas was nominated by the originally organized convention, and John C. Breckinridge by the bolters, each on the sharply defined platform relating to slavery, mentioned above.
Still another political body assembled in Baltimore in 1860, to wit: "The Constitutional Union Convention." It met May 9th. Its platform was intended to be comprehensive and so simple and patriotic that everybody might endorse it. It declared against recognizing any principle other than
"The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws."
John Bell of Tennessee was nominated on this broad platform for President, with Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-President, both eminently respectable statesmen, but the times were not auspicious for mere generalized principles or mere respectability.
The great Wigwam - Republican Convention met at Chicago, May 16, 1860, with delegates from all the free States, the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Its platform was long, and affirmed the principles of the Declaration of Independence, pronounced against interfering with slavery in the States, denounced the John Brown raid as "among the gravest of crimes," and, in the main, was temperate and conservative.
On the question of slavery in the Territories it was radical: