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| Presidential election results map. Blue denotes states won by Cass/Butler, Orange denotes those won by Taylor/Fillmore. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The United States presidential election of 1848 was an open race. President James K. Polk, having achieved all of his major objectives in one term and suffering from declining health that would take his life less than four months after leaving office, kept his promise not to seek re-election.
The Whigs in 1846-47 had focused all their energies on condemning Polk's war policies. They had to reverse course quickly. In February 1848 Polk surprised everyone with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War and gave the U.S. vast new territories (including California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico). The Whigs in the Senate voted 2-1 to approve the treaty. Then, in the summer, the Whigs nominated the hero of the war, Zachary Taylor. While he did promise no more future wars, he did not condemn the Mexican-American War or criticize Polk, and the Whigs had to follow his lead. They shifted their attention to the new issue of whether slavery could be banned from the new territories. The choice of Taylor was made almost out of desperation; he was not clearly committed to Whig principles, but he was popular for leading the war effort. The Democrats had a record of victory, peace, prosperity, and the acquisition of both Oregon and the Southwest. It appeared almost certain that they would win unless the Whigs picked Taylor. His victory made him one of only two Whigs to be elected President before the party ceased to exist in the 1850s; the other was William Henry Harrison, who had also been a general and war hero, but died a month into office.
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Whig candidates
Mexican-American War General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, an attractive candidate because of his successes on the battlefield, but who had never voted in an election himself, was openly courted by both the Democratic and Whig parties. Taylor ultimately declared himself a Whig, and easily took their nomination, receiving 171 delegate votes to defeat Henry Clay, Winfield Scott, Daniel Webster and others. After Webster turned down the vice presidential candidacy, Millard Fillmore received the party's nomination for Vice President.
| Ballots | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zachary Taylor | 111 | 118 | 133 | 171 |
| Henry Clay | 97 | 86 | 74 | 32 |
| Winfield Scott | 43 | 49 | 54 | 63 |
| Daniel Webster | 22 | 22 | 17 | 14 |
| John Middleton Clayton | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| John McLean | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Ballots | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Millard Fillmore | 115 | 173 |
| Abbott Lawrence | 109 | 87 |
| Andrew Stewart | 14 | 0 |
| Thomas M.T. McKennan | 13 | 0 |
| Abstaining | 23 | 6 |
Democratic candidates:
The Democrats countered by nominating Lewis Cass, who had served as Governor and Senator for Michigan, as well as Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, and from 1836 to 1842 as ambassador to France. General William Orlando Butler was nominated to join Cass on the ticket, garnering 169 delegate votes to defeat five other candidates, including future Vice President William R. King and future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The Democrats chose a platform that remained silent on slavery, and with Cass suspected of pro-slavery leanings, many anti-slavery Democrats walked out of the Baltimore convention to begin the Free Soil party.
| Ballots | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lewis Cass | 125 | 133 | 156 | 179 |
| Levi Woodbury | 53 | 56 | 53 | 38 |
| James Buchanan | 55 | 54 | 39 | 33 |
| John C. Calhoun | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| William Jenkins Worth | 6 | 6 | 5 | 1 |
| George M. Dallas | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| William Orlando Butler | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Abstaining | 39 | 38 | 37 | 35 |
| Ballots | 1 | 2 Before shifts |
2 After shifts |
|---|---|---|---|
| William Orlando Butler | 114 | 169 | 290 |
| John A. Quitman | 74 | 62 | 0 |
| William R. King | 26 | 8 | 0 |
| John Y. Mason | 24 | 3 | 0 |
| James Iver McKay | 13 | 11 | 0 |
| Jefferson Davis | 1 | 0 | 0 |
A third party, the Free Soil Party, was organized for the 1848 election to oppose further expansion of slavery into the western territories. The party was led by Salmon P. Chase and John Parker Hale. Former President Martin Van Buren defeated Hale by a 154-129 delegate count to capture the Free Soil nomination, while Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of two other presidents, was chosen as the vice presidential nominee.
| Presidential vote | Vice Presidential vote | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Martin Van Buren | 244 | Charles Francis Adams, Sr. | 467 |
| John Parker Hale | 183 | ||
| Joshua R. Giddings | 23 | ||
| Charles Francis Adams, Sr. | 13 | ||
| Others | 4 |
Across the land, Whig campaigners such as Abraham Lincoln talked up Taylor’s “antiparty” opposition to the Jacksonian commitment to the spoils system and yellow-dog partisanship. In the South they stressed that he was a Louisiana slaveholder, while in the North they highlighted his Whiggish willingness to defer to Congress on major issues (which he subsequently did not do). Democrats repeated, as they had for many years, their opposition to a national bank, high tariffs, and federal subsidies for local improvements. The Free Soilers branded both major parties lackeys of the Slave Power, arguing that the rich planters controlled the agenda of both parties, leaving the ordinary white man out of the picture. They had to work around Van Buren's well-known reputation for compromising with slavery. The Whigs had the advantage of highlighting Taylor's military glories. With Taylor remaining vague on the issues, the campaign was dominated by personalities and personal attacks, with the Democrats calling Taylor vulgar, uneducated, cruel and greedy, and the Whigs attacking Cass for graft and dishonesty. The division of the Democrats over slavery allowed Taylor to dominate the Northeast.[1]
With the exception of South Carolina, which left the selection of electors to its legislature, the election of 1848 marked the first time in which every state in the Union voted for President and Vice President on the same day: November 7, 1848. Taylor won the election over Cass, capturing 163 of the 290 electoral votes cast. However, Taylor won barely more than 47% of the popular vote, mainly because of the 10% the Free Soil Party had won.
| Presidential candidate | Party | Home state | Popular vote(a) | Electoral vote |
Running mate | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | Pct | Vice-presidential candidate | Home state | Elect. vote | ||||
| Zachary Taylor | Whig | Louisiana | 1,361,393 | 47.3% | 163 | Millard Fillmore | New York | 163 |
| Lewis Cass | Democratic | Michigan | 1,223,460 | 42.5% | 127 | William Orlando Butler | Kentucky | 127 |
| Martin Van Buren | Free Soil | New York | 291,501 | 10.1% | 0 | Charles Francis Adams, Sr. | Massachusetts | 0 |
| Gerrit Smith | Liberty | New York | 2,545 | 0.1% | 0 | Charles C. Foote | Michigan | 0 |
| Other | 285 | 0.0% | — | Other | — | |||
| Total | 2,879,184 | 100% | 290 | 290 | ||||
| Needed to win | 146 | 146 | ||||||
Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. 1848 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.
| Method of choosing Electors | State(s) |
|---|---|
| Each Elector appointed by state legislature | South Carolina |
| Each Elector chosen by voters statewide | (all other States) * |
* Massachusetts law provided that the state legislature would choose the Electors if no slate of Electors could command a majority of voters statewide. In 1848, this provision was triggered.
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