U.S. presidential election, 1856

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

The U.S. presidential election of 1856 was waged almost entirely on the issue of slavery, pitted as a struggle between democracy and aristocracy, and focusing specifically on Kansas. 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 new-minted American Party or "Know-Nothings", ignored the slavery issue (in favor of anti-immigration policies) and paid for it, getting under 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. 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, and the Know-Nothings nominated former President Millard Fillmore of New York.

Foreshadowing the results of the presidential election of 1860 (won by Abraham Lincoln), Frémont received less 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

1 General election 1.1 Results 2 See also 3 Reference 3.1 External link

General election

Results

Presidential Candidate	Party	Home State	Popular Vote(a), (b)		Electoral Vote	Running Mate	Running Mate's Home State	Running Mate's Electoral Vote
			Count	Percentage
James Buchanan	Democratic	Pennsylvania	1,838,169	45.3%	174	John Cabell Breckinridge	Kentucky	174
John Charles Frémont	Republican	California	1,341,264	33.1%	114	William Lewis Dayton	New Jersey	114
Millard Fillmore	American	New York	874,534	21.6%	8	Andrew Jackson Donelson	Tennessee	8
Total			4,053,967	100%	296	Total		296
Needed to win					149	Needed to win		149

^(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.
^(b) The popular vote total omits votes for candidates besides those listed, which skews the popular percentages up slightly.

See also

• History of the United States (1849-1865)
• Origins of the American Civil War

Reference

External link

• 1856 state-by-state popular voting results (http://www.multied.com/elections/1856Pop.html)
• The maps by counties of the presidential elections since 1856 (http://geoelections.free.fr)

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) U.S._presidential_election,_1856 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_1856) version history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=U.S._presidential_election,_1856&action=history) GNU Free Documentation Lizenz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License) CC-by-sa (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/)

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