John Bell (Tennessee Politician) - Presidential Candidacy

Presidential Candidacy

Annoyed by the continuous sectional strife in the Senate, Bell had pondered forming a third party to attract moderates from both the North and South throughout the 1850s. By 1859, the Know Nothing movement had collapsed, but Tennessee's Whigs had organized themselves into the Opposition Party, which had won several of the state's congressional seats. Several of this party's supporters, among them Knoxville Whig editor William Brownlow, former vice presidential candidate Andrew Jackson Donelson, and California attorney Balie Peyton, urged Bell to run for president on a third party ticket.

In May 1860, disgruntled ex-Whigs and disenchanted moderates from across the country convened in Baltimore, where they formed the Constitutional Union Party. The party's platform was very broad, and made no mention of slavery. While there were several candidates for the party's presidential nomination, the two frontrunners were Bell and Sam Houston. On May 9, Bell led the initial round of balloting with 68 votes to Houston's 59, with more than a dozen other candidates splitting the remainder. Houston's military endeavors had brought him national renown, but he reminded the convention's Clay Whigs of their old foe Andrew Jackson. On May 10, Bell received 138 votes to Houston's 69, and was declared the candidate. Edward Everett received the vice presidential nomination.

While Bell had supporters throughout the Northern states and the border states, most of his Northern allies had thrown their support behind Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln or Democratic candidate Stephen A. Douglas. He had little support south of the border states, where Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge was the clear frontrunner. Southern Democratic newspapers slammed him as a friend of abolitionists and Republicans. The Nashville Union, referring to the Constitutional Union Party's noncommitted platform, derided Bell as "Nobody's man," who "stands on nobody's platform." Bell also struggled with the youth vote, being more than a decade older than the next oldest candidate, Lincoln.

Seeing little chance of winning the election outright, Bell hoped that none of the three other candidates would get the required number of electoral votes, and the election would be sent to the House of Representatives, where he would be chosen as a compromise as the only non-sectional candidate. Neither he nor Everett campaigned extensively.

In the general election in November 1861, Bell received 592,906 popular votes (13% of the total; 39% of Southern popular votes), and won 39 electoral votes (13%). Bell carried Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee with narrow pluralities over Breckinridge, but was narrowly defeated by Breckinridge in Maryland, North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana, and by Douglas in Missouri, and lost badly in Delaware, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. While Bell received less than 3% of the popular vote cast in northern states, several of his electors were on fusion tickets with Douglas and Breckinridge electors, so this figure may not be representative of his actual support. In California, his vote exceeded Lincoln's plurality over Douglas.