The splintering of the Democratic Party during the presidential campaign of 1860 precipitated the fight for the Alabama Beacon. Douglas and Sen. Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia respectively received the national party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominations at the Democratic National Convention in Charleston in April, 1860.
Douglas offended many southern Democratic leaders because of his proposed solution to the question of slavery in the western territories. "The Little Giant" professed that "popular sovereignty" would solve this perplexing problem; in other words, the people of a territory could decide whether they wanted slavery or not. Douglas had sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which put his seemingly innocuous policy into action in Kansas Territory. The results were chaotic and violent. Douglas proceeded to offend southern slaveholders during his debates with Abraham Lincoln for the U. S. Senate in 1858. At Freeport, Illinois, Douglas argued that at any time an anti-slavery territorial legislature could prevent slavery by failing to enact police measures necessary for slavery’s existence, such as a fugitive slave law.
Thus, upon Douglas’s nomination for president, southern delegates led a walk-out from the convention. One-hundred-four seceding delegates from nineteen states nominated Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge as a southern-rights Democratic candidate at a separate convention in Baltimore.
The story of the battle for possession of the Alabama Beacon becomes especially significant as an example at the county level of the political process which would tear the entire nation apart. In a small city like Greensboro, the one weekly newspaper could easily become the focus of heated ideological battles, for newspapers were the most visible sources of partisan or factional propaganda. Ironically after the Civil War John G. Harvey edited the Beacon peacefully for another ten years and remained a respected member of the Greensboro community. His ouster in late 1860 reflects how political passions could curtail free expression even between friends -- John Erwin’s note to his former law partner Henry Watson notwithstanding.
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