Buchanan & the Election of 1860

When Democrats could not agree on a single candidate from the 1860 election, the northern and southern wings selected their own – Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, respectively. This development alarmed President John Buchanan, as a letter from August 1860 reveals. If “a re-union between the” northern and southern Democrats did not occur, Buchanan told editor Gerard Hallock that “the Constitution & the union cannot be perpetuated.” Yet the split in the party was not a simple North/South divide. While Hallock’s New York Journal of Commerce had provided able & valuable support…to [Buchanan’s] administration,” other northern Democrats were not as loyal. Calvert Comstock’s Albany (NY) Atlas & Argus had, as Buchanan explained, failed to “sustain the principles of my administration” and “[held] political doctrines in violation of the Constitution of the United States as expounded by the Supreme Court.”