On December 12, the Assembly chose Breckinridge over Joshua Fry Bell, the defeated candidate in the August gubernatorial election, by a vote of 81–53. In his acceptance speech, delivered to the Kentucky House of Representatives on December 21, Breckinridge endorsed the Supreme Court's decision in "Dred Scott v. Sandford" – which ruled that Congress could not restrict slavery in the territories – and insisted that John Brown's recent raid on Harpers Ferry was evidence of Republicans' insistence on either "negro equality" or violence. Resistance in some form, he predicted, would eventually be necessary. He still urged the Assembly against secession – "God forbid that the step shall ever be taken!" – but his discussion of growing sectional conflict bothered some, including his uncle Robert. Early in 1859, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina reported to a friend that Breckinridge was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, but as late as January 1860, Breckinridge told family members that he had no desire for the nomination. A "The New York Times" editorial noted that while Buchanan was falling "in prestige and political consequence, the star of the Vice President rises higher above the clouds." Douglas, considered the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was convinced that Breckinridge would be a candidate; this, combined with Buchanan's reluctant support of Breckinridge and Breckinridge's public support for a federal slave code deepened the rift between the two. Among Breckinridge's supporters at the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, were several prominent Kentuckians. They were former Kentucky Governor and current Senator Lazarus W. Powell, former Kentucky Congressmen William Preston (a distant relative) and law partner James Brown Clay, and James B. Beck. Breckinridge did not attend the convention, but instructed his supporters not to nominate him as long as James Guthrie remained a candidate. Accordingly, when a delegate from Arkansas nominated Breckinridge for president on the thirty-sixth ballot, Beck asked that it be withdrawn, and the request was honored. Over the course of 57 ballots, Douglas maintained a wide plurality, but failed to gain the necessary two-thirds majority; Guthrie consistently ran second. Unable to nominate a candidate, delegates voted to reconvene in Baltimore, Maryland on June 18. Pro-Southern delegates, who had walked out of the Charleston convention in protest of its failure to adopt a federal slave code plank in its platform, did not participate in the Baltimore convention.