United States presidential election, 1856
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The U.S. presidential election of 1856 was unusually heated. The Republicans crusaded against the Slave Power, while the Democrats warned that the Republicans were extremists whose victory would lead to civil war. The newly formed Republican Party condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act and expansion of slavery, while Democrats took more of a laissez-faire approach to slavery expansion, taking the official position that it was a state-by-state decision. A third party, the relatively new American Party or "Know-Nothings", ignored the slavery issue (in favor of anti-immigration policies) and won a quarter of the vote.
The incumbent President, Franklin Pierce, was defeated in his effort to be renominated by the Democrats, who instead selected James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; this was thanks in part to the fact that the Kansas-Nebraska Act divided Democrats. The Whig Party had disintegrated over the issue of slavery, and new organizations such as the Republican Party and the American Party competed to replace them. The Republicans nominated John Frémont of California as their first standard bearer, over Senator William H. Seward, and the Know-Nothings nominated former President Millard Fillmore of New York. Perennial candidate Daniel Pratt also ran.
Frémont received fewer than 600 votes from slave states—those all coming from Delaware and Maryland. The electoral college results indicated, however, that the Republicans could likely win the next election in 1860 by winning just two more states—such as Pennsylvania and Illinois.
Contents |
[edit] General election
[edit] Campaign
None of the three candidates took to the stump. Republicans opposed the extension of slavery into the territories — in fact, their slogan was "Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Frémont and victory!" The Republicans thus crusaded against the Slave power, warning it was destroying Republican values. Democrats counter-crusaded by warning that a Republican victory would bring Civil War.
The Republican platform opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise through the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the policy of popular sovereignty in deciding whether a state would enter the Union as a free or slave state. The Republicans also accused the Pierce administration of allowing a fraudulent territorial goverment to be imposed upon the citizens of the Kansas Territory, allowing the violence that had raged in Bleeding Kansas, and advocated the immediate admittance of Kansas as a free state. Along with opposing the spread of slavery into the continental territories of the United States the party also opposed the Ostend Manifesto which advocated the annexation of Cuba from Spain. In summation the campaign true focus was against the system of slavery, which they felt was destroying the Republican values that the Union had been founded upon.
The Democratic platform supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the system of popular sovereignty established in the the Western territories. The party supported the pro-slavery territorial legislation elected in Kansas opposing the free state elements within Kansas and the Topeka Constitution as an illegal document written during an illegal convention. The democrats also supported the plan to annex Cuba, advocated in the Ostend Manifesto, which Buchanan had help devise while serving as minister to Britain. Most influential aspect of the Democratic campaign was a warning that a Republican victory would lead to the secession of numerous southern states.
[edit] Results
| Presidential Candidate | Party | Home State | Popular Vote(a) | Electoral Vote | Running Mate | Running Mate's Home State |
Running Mate's Electoral Vote |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Percentage | |||||||
| James Buchanan | Democratic | Pennsylvania | 1,836,072 | 45.3% | 174 | John Cabell Breckinridge | Kentucky | 174 |
| John Charles Frémont | Republican | California | 1,342,345 | 33.1% | 114 | William Lewis Dayton | New Jersey | 114 |
| Millard Fillmore | American/Whig | New York | 873,053 | 21.6% | 8 | Andrew Jackson Donelson | Tennessee | 8 |
| Other | 3,177 | 0.1% | 0 | Other | 0 | |||
| Total | 4,058,647 | 100.0% | 296 | Total | 296 | |||
| Needed to win | 149 | Needed to win | 149 | |||||
Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1856 Presidential Election Results. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (July 27, 2005).
Source (Electoral Vote): Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996. Official website of the National Archives. (July 31, 2005).
(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.
[edit] See also
- American election campaigns in the 19th century
- History of the United States (1849–1865)
- History of the United States Democratic Party
- History of the United States Republican Party
- Origins of the American Civil War
- Third Party System
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992)
- Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970)
- William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (1987).
- Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978), pp 139-81
- Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union: vol 2: A House Dividing, 1852-1857 (1947), the most detailed narrative
- Michael D. Pierson; "'Prairies on Fire': The Organization of the 1856 Mass Republican Rally in Beloit, Wisconsin" Civil War History, Vol. 48, 2002
- Potter, David (1976). Impending Crisis 1848–1861. ISBN 0-06-090524-7.
- James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (1969)
- Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (1976) 254-91
[edit] External links
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