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Commander In Chief: The Hero of the Common People It had been a long time coming. Hopelessly divided by the issue of slavery, thirty-one million American citizens were in 1860 Called upon to elect the 16th President of the United States. The Democratic Party met At its National Party Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in order to choose their nominee for the presidency. Split over slavery, each faction, Northern Democrats on the one hand and Southern Democrats on the other, presented its own opposite proposal for the party platform. In February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi claimed that neither the Congress of the United States nor the territorial parliaments had the power to touch slavery. Southern Democrats and few Northern pro-slavery Democrats support the Davis resolution: "the Government of a Territory (...) is provisional and temporary, and during its existence all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation." The Southerners' desire was to pass a slave code, that is, a federal law protecting slavery in the territor