On June 23d, the convention proceeded to ballot.  Douglas received 173-1/2 votes; Guthrie 10; and Breckinridge 5; scattering 3.  On the second ballot, Douglas received all but thirteen votes; whereupon it was moved and carried unanimously with a tremendous shout that Douglas, having received “two-thirds of all votes given in this convention,” should be the nominee of the party.[848] Colonel Richardson then begged leave to have the Secretary read a letter from Senator Douglas.  He had carried it in his pocket for three days, but the course of the bolters, he said, had prevented him from using it.[849] The letter was of the same tenor as that written to Dean Richmond.  There is little likelihood that an earlier acquaintance with its contents would have changed the course of events, since so long as the platform stood unaltered, the choice of Douglas was a logical and practical necessity.  Douglas and the platform were one and inseparable.

Meantime the bolters completed their destructive work by organizing a separate convention in Baltimore, by adopting the report of the majority in the Charleston convention as their platform, and by nominating John C. Breckinridge as their candidate for the presidency.  Lane of Oregon was named for the second place on the ticket for much the same reason that Fitzpatrick of Alabama, and subsequently Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia, was put upon the Douglas ticket.  Both factions desired to demonstrate that they were national Democrats, with adherents in all sections.  In his letter of acceptance Douglas rang the changes on the sectional character of the doctrine of intervention either for or against slavery.  “If the power and duty of Federal interference is to be conceded, two hostile sectional parties must be the inevitable result—­the one inflaming the passions and ambitions of the North, the other of the South."[850] Indeed, his best,—­his only,—­chance of success lay in his power to appeal to conservative, Union-loving men, North and South.  This was the secret purpose of his frequent references to Clay and Webster, who were invoked as supporters of “the essential, living principle of 1850”; i.e. his own doctrine of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the Territories.  But the Constitutional Union party was quite as likely to attract the remnant of the old Whig party of Clay and Webster.

Douglas began his campaign in excellent spirits.  His only regret was that he had been placed in a position where he had to look on and see a fight without taking a hand in it.[851] The New York Times, whose editor followed the campaign of Douglas with the keenest interest, without indorsing him, frankly conceded that popular sovereignty had a very strong hold upon the instinct of nine-tenths of the American people.[852] Douglas wrote to his Illinois confidant in high spirits after the ratification meeting in New York.[853] Conceding South Carolina and possibly Mississippi to Breckinridge,