After two days of bitter parliamentary wrangling, Douglas men pushed through their platform by a vote of 165 to 138 (free states 154 to 30, slave states 11 to 108). Fifty delegates from the lower South thereupon walked out. Everything that followed was anticlimax. Douglas could not muster the two-thirds majority required for nomination. Nor could the convention agree on anyone else during fifty-seven acrimonious ballots. Exhausted and heartsick, the delegates adjourned to try again six weeks later in the more hospitable clime of Baltimore.
