The Constitutional Union Party was a political party which ran in the 1860 United States elections. It mostly consisted of conservative former Whigs from the Southern United States who wanted to avoid secession over slavery and refused to join either the Republican Party or Democratic Party. The Constitutional Union Party campaigned on a simple platform "to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution of the country, the Union of the states, and the Enforcement of the Laws".
The Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s due to a series of crises over slavery. Many former Whigs joined the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, but others joined the nativist American Party, colloquially referred to as the "Know Nothings". The American Party declined after the 1856 elections, and for the 1860 elections John J. Crittenden and other former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party.
The party's 1860 convention nominated John Bell of Tennessee – a slaveholder, but an opponent in the 1850s of the expansion of slavery into the territories – for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president. Party leaders hoped to force a contingent election, in which no candidate received a majority of electors in the Electoral College, moving the decision into the House of Representatives, as described in Article Two, Section 1, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution and modified in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment.
The 1860 election essentially consisted of two separate elections, as Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln competed with Northern Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas in the North, and Bell competed with Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge in the South. (Lincoln was not even on the ballot in the Deep South.) Ultimately, Lincoln won the election by winning nearly every Northern electoral vote. Bell took 12.6% of the nationwide popular vote, carrying Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, and finishing with the second highest vote total in each remaining slave state that held a popular vote. (South Carolina's electors were chosen by the state legislature, the only remaining state to use this method and the last election in which it was used.)
After the election, Crittenden and other Constitutional Unionists unsuccessfully sought to prevent a civil war with the Crittenden Compromise and the Peace Conference of 1861. Bell declared his support for the Confederacy following the Battle of Fort Sumter, but many other Constitutional Unionists remained loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War.
Background
right|thumb|upright=1.5|Results by county in the [[1856 United States presidential election|1856 presidential election. Shades of yellow indicate counties that voted for American Party candidate Millard Fillmore. Many Fillmore supporters would later join the Constitutional Union Party.]]
The Constitutional Union Party had its roots in the Whig Party and the sectional crises of the 1850s. The Compromise of 1850 shook up partisan alignments in the South, with elections in the Lower South being contested by Unionists and extremist "Fire-Eaters" rather than Whigs and Democrats. The victory of pro-compromise Southern politicians in these elections, along with President Millard Fillmore's attempts at diligently enforcing the Fugitive Slave Clause, temporarily quieted Southern calls for secession. The debate over the Kansas–Nebraska Act again polarized legislators sectional lines, with Southern Whigs providing critical votes in the House as a narrow majority of Northern Democrats voted against it.
A new, anti-slavery party known as the Republican Party was formed in May 1854. Republican leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, generally did not call for the abolition of slavery, but instead called for Congress to prevent the extension of slavery into the territories. By 1855, Republicans had replaced the Whigs as the main opposition to the Democrats in most Northern states. The nativist American Party displaced the Whigs in the remaining states; though some Democrats joined the American Party, in many Southern states the American Party consisted almost entirely of former Whigs.
The 1856 American National Convention nominated former President Fillmore for president in the 1856 presidential election; Fillmore also received the presidential nomination at the sparsely attended 1856 Whig National Convention. Many supporters of the American Party continued to identify primarily as Whigs, and Fillmore minimized the issue of nativism, instead attempting to use his campaign as a platform for unionism and a revival of the Whig Party. He finished in second in several states in the South and carried just a single state in the 1856 election, confirming that the Republican Party, rather than the American Party, would replace the Whigs as the main opposition to the Democrats. The American Party collapsed after the 1856 elections, and many Southern officeholders who refused to join the Democratic Party organized themselves into the Opposition Party.
Formation
thumb|upright=0.7|Senator [[John J. Crittenden founded the party.]]
Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, Henry Clay's successor in Southern Whiggery, led a group of conservative, unionist congressmen in forming the Constitutional Union Party. At Crittenden's behest, fifty former and current members of Congress met in Washington, D.C. in December 1859, where they agreed to form a new party dedicated to preserving the union and avoiding debates over slavery. The new party received the blessing of the respective national committees of the Whig Party and the American Party, and was officially formed on February 12, 1860.
Among the members of the new party's executive committee were Crittenden, former Democratic Senator William Cabell Rives of Virginia, 1852 Whig vice presidential nominee William Alexander Graham of North Carolina, former Congressman John P. Kennedy of Maryland, and newspaper editor William Gannaway Brownlow of Tennessee. Many of these Northerners, including Everett, were followers of Daniel Webster, a Whig senator from Massachusetts who had died in 1852.
Party leaders did not expect to win the election outright, but instead sought to win states in the Upper South and the Lower North. Constitutional Unionists hoped to deny an electoral vote majority to any one candidate, thereby forcing a contingent election in the House of Representatives.