United States presidential election, 1856 | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 02/12/2018

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United States presidential election, 1856

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SUMMARY
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The United States presidential election of 1856 was the 18th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 1856. In a three-way election, Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican nominee John C. Frémont and American Party nominee Millard Fillmore. So far, this has been the only time in U.S. history in which a political party kept the presidency after denying the nomination to the sitting president seeking it.
Incumbent Democratic President Franklin Pierce was widely unpopular due to the ongoing civil war in Kansas Territory, and Buchanan defeated Pierce at the 1856 Democratic National Convention.  Buchanan, a former Secretary of State, had avoided the divisive debates over the Kansas–Nebraska Act by virtue of his service as the Ambassador to Great Britain. Slavery was the omnipresent issue, and opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories motivated the rise of the nascent Republican Party. The Republicans and the nativist Know Nothings (known formally as the American Party) competed to replace the defunct Whig Party as the primary opposition to the Democrats. The 1856 Republican National Convention nominated a ticket led by Frémont, an explorer and military officer who had served in the Mexican–American War. The Know Nothings, who ignored slavery and instead emphasized anti-immigration and anti-Catholic policies, nominated a ticket led by former Whig President Millard Fillmore.
The Democrats endorsed popular sovereignty as the method to determine slavery's legality for newly admitted states. Frémont decried the expansion of slavery, while Buchanan warned that the Republicans were extremists whose victory would lead to civil war. The Know Nothings attempted to present themselves as the one party capable of bridging the sectional divides. All three parties found support in the North, but the Republicans had virtually no backing in the South.
Buchanan won a plurality of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote, taking all but one slave state as well as a handful of free states. His popular vote margin of 12.2% was the greatest margin between 1836 and 1904. Frémont won a majority of the electoral votes from free states and finished second in the nationwide popular vote, while Fillmore took 21.5% of the popular vote and carried Maryland. The Know Nothings collapsed as a national party after the 1856 election, as most of its anti-slavery members joined the Republican Party in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford the following year. 1856 also proved to be the last Democratic presidential victory until the 1884 election, as Republicans emerged as the dominant party during and after the Civil War.