The Rupture of the Antebellum Democratic Party

Abstract

In 1860, the issue of slavery's status in the nation's territories ruptured the national Democratic Party despite the party's long history of successfully compromising on the slavery issue. When southern Democrats walked out of the party's national convention and initiated the formation of an alternative national party organization, they anticipated the South's later secession from the Union. If southern Democrats would not remain within the Democratic Party and could not cooperate with northern Democrats, there was little or no possibility that southerners would remain within the Union, since the national debate over slavery was much wider and more robust than the Democratic Party's internal discussion of that issue. While the Republicans' anti-slavery and anti-extension beliefs fundamentally challenged slavery's existence, northern Democrats confined their disagreement with their southern colleagues to the procedural dimension, i.e. to a discussion of what the Supreme Court had or had not decided in its 1857 Dred Scott decision and what the national party had agreed in 1856. Therefore, the internal conflict within the national Democratic Party provides a new perspective on secession, not because it reproduced the wider national disagreement about slavery, but precisely because it was so much narrower than that national conflict.