The Civil War began in Charleston — at a convention

One hundred and fifty years ago today, at high noon on April 23, 1860, the Democratic Party opened its national convention in Charleston.

The Democratic Party was then the majority party in American politics. The president, James Buchanan, was a Democrat.

His predecessor, Franklin Pierce, was a Democrat. 'There are radical and inextinguishable feuds in the Democratic Party,' the reporter Murat Halstead wrote, 'and they must come out here and now.'

Indeed, 'no American political convention has ever held so much meaning for a party and nation,' one historian wrote about the convention in Charleston.

The Republican Party was in its infancy. The Old Whig Party of Henry Clay had collapsed, and anti-slavery, 'Free Soil' men created a new party, the Republican Party, led by John Fremont, Henry Seward, the influential senator from New York, and Salmon Chase, the senator from Ohio.

The powerful senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, who had defeated that upstart Abraham Lincoln for a Senate seat from Illinois, was in line to be nominated for president in Charleston.

He would then go on to preserve the Union by accommodating Southerners and pacifying Northerners on the burning, all-consuming issue of slavery.

But it was not to be.

As Roy Nichols noted, 'The imps of Satan must have chuckled with devilish glee' to learn that the Democratic Party was to meet in Charleston.

A bitter fight was to ensue between out-and-out secessionists who wanted to break away from the Union and moderate Democrats — North and South — who wanted to somehow figure out what to do about the controversy over slavery.

The convention was held in Institute Hall, a large, hot, inefficient cavernous building at 134 Meeting Street. (The building is gone). Delegates came from all over the nation and stayed at Hibernian Hall, the Mills House, the Charleston Hotel and on steamships, which brought delegates from New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

The hall was hot. The antagonistic delegates were equally hot.

Southerners insisted on their absolute right to take slaves into the Western territories.

Northern and Western delegates would not agree to force slavery on the territories.

The 'irrepressible conflict' shattered the convention.

The fire-eating secessionist William Lowndes Yancey from Alabama made a dramatic speech, the highlight of the convention, in which he said:

'Ours is the property invaded; ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake — the honor of children, the honor of families, the lives, perhaps, of all. ... Bear with us, then, if we stand sternly upon what is yet that dormant volcano, and say we yield no position here until we are convinced we are wrong.'

Northern and Western Democrats refused to countenance the unconditional expansion of slavery. 'Gentlemen of the South,' George Pugh of Ohio thundered, 'you mistake us — you mistake us — we will not do it.'

Halstead reported, 'This thing is a hopeless jumble.' Lincoln called it 'the Charleston fandango.' On April 30, when the convention voted against the Southern position, 165-138, most of the Southern delegates walked out. The Northern and Western delegates could not believe it.

The next day some delegates left. It was becoming increasingly clear that the convention was a debacle. The Democratic nomination would not be worth much in the 1860 election. Roy Nichols observed that Charlestonians filled the gallery to 'see the first act of the great tragedy which was to have so many of its scenes in their city.'

Charleston had played its first critical role in bringing about the Civil War by disrupting the Democratic Party Convention. Douglas would not be nominated in Charleston. The nation was awestruck by the virtual destruction of the majority party. Many Charlestonians celebrated. 'There was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston last night — a jubilee,' Halstead reported.

Douglas predicted that 'in less than 12 months we should be at war.'

'Douglas's prophecy was chillingly sound,' Dr. Faye Jensen wrote. 'The Split of the Democratic Party was a harbinger for the dissolution of the nation.'

Robert N. Rosen is author of "Confederate Charleston, an Illustrated History of the City and the People during the Civil War" and president of the Fort Sumter-Fort Moultrie Trust (info@fortsumtertrust.org), which is coordinating the Civil War sesquicentennial in the Lowcountry.