Election of 1856

(noun)

An unusually heated contest that led to the election of James Buchanan, the ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Related Terms

Examples of Election of 1856 in the following topics:

  • The Election of 1856

    • The election of 1856 demonstrated the extremity of sectional polarization in U.S. national politics.
    • The election of 1856 demonstrated the extremity of sectional polarization in national politics during this era.
    • Buchanan won the election of 1856 with the full support of the South as well as five free states.
    • Buchanan had won 45.3 percent of the popular vote and 174 electoral votes whereas Frémont had won 33.1 percent of the popular vote and 114 electoral votes.
    • Democratic candidate for president in 1856 and fifteenth president of the United States.

  • Jackson and the Democratic Party

    • It was primarily built by Martin Van Buren, who rallied a cadre of politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.
    • Democrats strongly favored expansion to new farm lands, as typified by their attacks on and expulsion of eastern American Indians and their invasion of vast amounts of new land in the West after 1846.
    • Jackson's vice president, Martin Van Buren, won the presidency in 1836, but the Panic of 1837 caused his defeat in 1840 at the hands of the Whig ticket of General William Henry Harrison and John Tyler.
    • The fragmented opposition could not stop the election of Democrats Franklin Pierce in 1852 and James Buchanan in 1856.
    • The 1840s and 1850s were the heyday of a new faction of young Democrats called "Young America."

  • The Rise of Wilson

    • Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924) was the 28th U.S. president and a leader of the American Progressive movement.
    • Wilson, the only Democrat other than Grover Cleveland to be elected president since 1856 and the first Southerner since 1848, recognized his party's need for high-level federal patronage.
    • In his Columbia University lectures of 1907, Wilson had said, "The whole art of statesmanship is the art of bringing the several parts of government into effective cooperation for the accomplishment of particular common objects."
    • For his sponsorship of the League of Nations, Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize.
    • Portrait of Woodrow Wilson, who was the 28th president of the United States.

  • The Election of 1824

    • The presidential election of 1824 is notable for being the only election since the passage of the Twelfth Amendment to have been decided by the House of Representatives.
    • With tens of thousands of new voters, the older system of having members of Congress form congressional caucuses to determine who would run no longer worked.
    • Once in office, Adams elevated Henry Clay to the post of secretary of state.
    • This map of the Electoral College votes of 1824 illustrates the number of electoral votes allotted to each candidate in each state.
    • This map illustrates the voting for candidates by state in the House of Representatives election of 1824.

  • Wartime Politics and the 1944 Election

    • It was also the first election in which one of the candidates was born in the 20th century.
    • Nonetheless, Roosevelt's continuing popularity was the main theme of the campaign.
    • Dewey did better against Roosevelt than any of FDR's previous three Republican opponents, and he did have the personal satisfaction of beating Roosevelt in FDR's hometown of Hyde Park, New York, and of winning Vice President-elect Truman's hometown of Independence, Missouri.
    • President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office in the election of 1944
    • FDR defeated Thomas Dewey, Governor of Roosevelt's home state of New York, in the election of 1944.

  • The Election of 1840

    • In the wake of the Panic of 1837, William Henry Harrison won the Election of 1840 with his "log cabin campaign" appeal to ordinary people.
    • The United States presidential election of 1840 saw President Martin Van Buren fight for reelection against the backdrop of economic depression.
    • The convention came on the heels of a string of Whig electoral losses.
    • In the wake of the Panic of 1837, Van Buren was widely unpopular, and Harrison, following Andrew Jackson's strategy, ran as a war hero and man of the people.
    • Said one Democratic newspaper: "Give him a barrel of hard cider, and…a pension of two thousand [dollars] a year…and…he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin. " Whigs, eager to deliver what the public wanted, took advantage of this and declared that Harrison was "the log cabin and hard cider candidate," a man of the common people from the rough-and-tumble West.

  • The Disputed Election of 2000

    • Al Gore of Tennessee was a consistent front-runner for the nomination.
    • Bush became the early front-runner, acquiring unprecedented funding, a broad base of leadership support from his governorship of Texas, and the name recognition and connections of the Bush family.
    • As election night wore on, the returns in a handful of small-to-medium sized states, including Wisconsin and Iowa, were extremely close; however, it was the state of Florida that would make clear the winner of the election.
    • The outcome of the election was not known for more than a month after the balloting ended because of the extended process of counting and then recounting Florida's presidential ballots.
    • A count of overseas military ballots later boosted his margin to about 900 votes.

  • Postwar Politics and the Election of 1920

    • The US presidential election of 1920 was dominated by the aftermath of World War I, hostility towards certain policies of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, and opposition to the reformist zeal of the Progressive Era.
    • Internationally, politicians were arguing over peace treaties and the question of America's entry into the League of Nations, which produced an isolationist reaction.
    • Roosevelt (a fifth cousin of Theodore) as his running mate .
    • However, the provisions of these were inadequate to the supporters of the Irish Republic, who wanted full sovereignty.
    • Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.

  • The Election of 1888

    • In the election of 1888, President Grover Cleveland lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College despite winning the popular vote.
    • The 1888 election for President of the United States saw Grover Cleveland of New York, the incumbent president and a Democrat, try to secure a second term against the Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison, a former U.S.
    • Harrison swept almost the entire North and Midwest, losing only Connecticut and New Jersey, but carried the swing states of New York and Indiana to achieve a majority of the electoral vote.
    • Unlike the election of 1884, the power of the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City helped deny Cleveland the electoral votes of his home state.
    • This was the third of only four U.S. elections in which the winner did not come in first in the popular vote.

  • The Election of 1828 and the Character Issue

    • The election of 1828 between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson saw a large number of character attacks and increased partisanship.
    • Historians debate the significance of the election, with many arguing that it marked the beginning of modern American politics and the formation of the two-party system.
    • Jackson and his supporters reminded voters of the “corrupt bargain” of 1824.
    • Jackson was attacked for his marriage, his court martial and execution of deserters, his massacres of American Indian villages, and his habit of dueling.
    • The election was the climax of several decades of expanding democracy in the United States and the end of the older politics of deference.