The advantages of compact organization and conscious purpose were apparent in the first days of the convention.  At every point the Douglas men forced the fighting.  On the second day, it was voted that where a delegation had not been instructed by a State convention how to give its vote, the individual delegates might vote as they pleased.  This rule would work to the obvious advantage of Douglas.[825] On the third day, the convention refused to admit the contesting delegations from New York and Illinois, represented by Fernando Wood and Isaac Cook respectively.[826]

Meantime the committee on resolutions, composed of one delegate from each State, was in the throes of platform-making.  Both factions had agreed to frame a platform before naming a candidate.  But here, as in the convention, the possibility of amiable discussion and mutual concession was precluded.  The Southern delegates voted in caucus to hold to the Davis resolutions; the Northern, with equal stubbornness, clung to the well-known principles of Douglas.  On the fifth day of the convention, April 27th, the committee presented a majority report and two minority reports.  The first was essentially an epitome of the Davis resolutions; the second reaffirmed the Cincinnati platform, at the same time pledging the party to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court on those questions of constitutional law which should affect the rights of property in the States or Territories; and the third report simply reaffirmed the Cincinnati platform without additional resolutions.[827] The defense of the main minority report fell to Payne of Ohio.  In a much more conciliatory spirit than Douglas men had hitherto shown, he assured the Southern members of the convention that every man who had signed the report felt that “upon the result of our deliberations and the action of this convention, in all human probability, depended the fate of the Democratic party and the destiny of the Union.”  The North was devoted to the principle of popular sovereignty, but “we ask nothing for the people of the territories but what the Constitution allows them."[828] The argument of Payne was cogent and commended itself warmly to Northern delegates; but it struck Southern ears as a tiresome reiteration of arguments drawn from premises which they could not admit.

It was Yancey of Alabama, chief among fire-eaters, who, in the afternoon of the same day, warmed the cockles of the Southern heart.  Gifted with all the graces of Southern orators, he made an eloquent plea for Southern rights.  Protection was what the South demanded:  protection in their constitutional rights and in their sacred rights of property.  The proposition contained in the minority report would ruin the South.  “You acknowledged that slavery did not exist by the law of nature or by the law of God—­that it only existed by State law; that it was wrong, but that you were not to blame.  That was your position, and it was wrong.  If you had taken the position directly that slavery was right, and therefore ought to be ... you would have triumphed, and anti-slavery would now have been dead in your midst....  I say it in no disrespect, but it is a logical argument that your admission that slavery is wrong has been the cause of all this discord."[829]