Between 1837, when Jackson retired, and 1860, four Democratic presidents--Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan--were elected. The Democrats won every presidential election except those of 1840 and 1848. But during the 1840s and '50s the party began to undergo serious internal strains over the issue of slavery and its extension to the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, insisted on the protection of slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, advocated the doctrine of popular sovereignty, under which the settlers in a territory could vote to ban slavery from their midst. The party split over the slavery issue in 1860 at its presidential convention in Charleston, S.C. The Northern Democrats nominated Douglas as their presidential candidate, and the Southern Democrats adopted a proslavery stance and nominated John C. Breckinridge as their presidential candidate. This North-South split proved disastrous to the Democrats; the newly formed, antislavery Republican Party won its first national victory under Abraham Lincoln in 1860, receiving a majority of votes in the electoral college because of the split.
From 1860 to 1900 the Democratic Party held the presidency for only eight years, during the two terms of Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97). In the postwar decades white Southerners associated the Republican Party both with the prosecution of the Civil War and with Radical Reconstruction; these voters subsequently remained firmly Democratic until the mid-20th century. The Democratic Party at this time was basically conservative and agrarian-oriented; its members were opposed to big business and protective tariffs and in favour of cheap-money policies. In 1896 the party once more split disastrously over the free-silver and Populist program of its presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who lost that year's election. Through their support of economic radicalism under Bryan's leadership, the Democrats once again after 1896 became a minority party.
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