But the Democratic party was itself hopelessly divided. The radical pro-slavery men at the South had made up their minds to disunion as a thing desirable and necessary. They did not want the Democratic or any other national party to win unless they could themselves dominate and control it. The extreme men among them wanted the Republicans to succeed in the election in order that there might be an excuse for secession. The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, S. C., on April 23, 1860. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from the beginning was the first choice of a majority of the delegates as the party's candidate, but he could not command that two-thirds' vote which the party had always insisted upon as a condition precedent to nomination. In his Illinois campaign against Lincoln in 1858, Douglas had been logically forced to make certain admissions as to the right of the people in a territory to exclude slavery from it before it became a state, which deeply offended the extremists of the South. There was also in effective play the active desire of these extremists to disrupt the party and secure its defeat as a pretext for secession. To have nominated Douglas at that time would have been to elect him with absolute certainty, and to have elected him in 1860 would have been to postpone the program of secession for at least four years. So from the beginning to the end the radical pro-slavery men held out against Douglas's nomination. They in the end seceded from the convention and after ten days of fruitless wrangling that body adjourned without making a nomination or adopting a platform, to meet again at Baltimore on the eighteenth of June. This second meeting of the convention was the signal for still further and bitterer wrangling. The Southerners again withdrew and in the end two candidates were nominated--Douglas by that part of the convention which claimed to be national and Breckinridge by the Southern wing. This was a direct invitation to defeat. It not only compelled such a division of the Democratic vote as to render the success of either Democratic candidate impossible, but it was accompanied by the still further division of the forces opposed to the strictly sectional and geographical Republican party. The old Whigs and those in sympathy with their desire to preserve the Union if possible, had met in convention in Baltimore on the ninth of May, adopted, as their platform, resolutions pledging devotion to "the Union, the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws," and under the name of "the Constitutional Union party" nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice-president.