The Democrats held their Convention in Cincinnati on June 3d, before the Republican Convention was held, and nominated James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, for President, and John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, for Vice-President. President Pierce and Senator Douglas were both candidates for the presidential nomination, but were withdrawn on the fifteenth and sixteenth ballots because the South had already selected a candidate. Mr. Buchanan had been absent as Minister to England during the turmoil over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In addition, he came from a Northern State, and was therefore doubly attractive as a candidate; for the South, with its 112 electoral votes, needed 37 more votes to elect their candidate, and Pennsylvania, with 27 votes, was looked on as the pivotal State. The Democratic Platform, as usual, denounced the Abolitionists, and repeated its hollow promise of 1852, that the party would resist all attempts at renewing the agitation of the slavery question. It denounced the Republican Party as "sectional, and subsisting exclusively on slavery agitation," and it contained the following remarkable and artfully worded plank: "_Resolved_, That we recognize the right of the people of all the Territories, including Kansas and Nebraska, acting through the legally and fairly expressed will of a majority of actual residents, and whenever the number of their inhabitants justifies it, to form a Constitution, with or without domestic slavery, and be admitted into the Union upon terms of perfect equality with other States." The ambiguous part of this plank was the insertion of the right of the inhabitants to form a Constitution with or without domestic slavery. Mr. Douglas and the other Democratic speakers argued in the North that this meant that the people of the Territory had the right to decide for or against slavery, but the South looked upon it as fully protecting slavery in any Territory until a Constitution could be formed. In the North and South the plank obtained votes for the party, but the votes were cast in the respective sections on diametrically opposed grounds. The political situation in this campaign was somewhat complicated at first by the presentation of so many candidates, for, in addition to the candidates already named, the Abolitionists presented a ticket, as did also a number of Americans, who seceded from the second convention of that party, but the situation gradually resolved itself into a contest between Buchanan, Fremont and Fillmore. No electoral tickets were presented for Fremont in the slave States, and the fact that Fillmore could not carry any of the free States weakened him in the South, and it was seen that Buchanan would receive the solid electoral vote of the South, and that the contest would therefore be between Buchanan and Fremont for the Northern electoral votes.