In 1860, the Republican Party convened in Chicago. The presumptive presidential nominee, William H. Seward, was both the best known and one of the most outspoken candidates. Yet Seward's long political career and rising popularity of Abraham Lincoln proved his undoing, and Lincoln was elected on the third ballot. The Republican platform asserted that the spread of slavery into the territories was a "dangerous political heresy." Instead, the party remained committed to the non-extension of slavery. The Republicans argued that the founders viewed freedom as the "normal condition" of the territories, and thus the Democratic Party's insistence on the right to spread slavery through political acts, violence, or popular sovereignty was anathema to the founder's intentions.