The United States presidential election of 1860 was a divisionist election year. The nation had been divided throughout most of the 1850s on questions of states' rights and slavery in the territories. In 1860 this issue finally came to a head, fracturing the formerly dominant Democratic Party into Southern and Northern factions and bringing the compromise candidate John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party into the presidency, carrying nearly all the southern states, plus Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio and Pennsylvania.