From December 3, 1855, to February 2, 1856, the incoming House of Representatives held an election for speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. After one hundred and thirty-two inconclusive ballots, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks of Massachusetts was elected over William Aiken Jr. of South Carolina pursuant to a temporary rule permitting a candidate to be elected with a plurality of the vote. The election was dominated by debate over slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and contemporary reaction recognized Banks's victory as the first "Northern victory" in the events leading to the American Civil War.
Following the 1854–55 United States House of Representatives elections, opponents of the incumbent Franklin Pierce administration won a large majority of the seats in the House. However, the anti-administration representatives-elect, grouped together informally as the "Opposition," had little common ground and no common party organization. Five Opposition candidates were formally nominated, but the race soon coalesced around two Opposition figures, Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts and Henry Mills Fuller of Pennsylvania, against Democratic nominee William Alexander Richardson. Banks gained the formal nomination of the Opposition but repeatedly fell short of a majority of the House as many members of the Opposition, primarily Southern nativists or anti-abolitionists, cast their votes for Fuller or other Opposition candidates. On the final day of balloting, members of Democratic minority agreed to the use of plurality voting, having settled on South Carolina unionist William Aiken Jr. as a compromise candidate who could win the votes of the southern Opposition. On the final ballot, Aiken gained most of the dissident Opposition votes but fell three short of Banks.
As of , this remains the longest election for speaker in the history of the United States House, both in terms of ballots and duration, and a record 135 people received votes. Banks remains one of only two Speakers, with Howell Cobb in 1849, elected by plurality.
Background Kansas-Nebraska Act
In May 1854, the 33rd Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act with support from President Franklin Pierce, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and pro-slavery Democratic members of the House. The Act repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 by establishing a path to statehood for the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and allowing these new states to permit or prohibit slavery by popular referendum. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was regarded as a major victory for pro-slavery activists, as the two Compromises had previously restricted any further legalization of slavery to lands south of parallel 36°30′ north. The new possibility of slavery north of this parallel inflamed political tensions, especially in the Northern United States, and immediately triggered a trend of political migration to the territories in hopes of influencing the first territorial elections. The political reaction was immediately negative for Pierce and the Democratic Party. Even some pro-slavery legislators and voters, particularly Southern members of the Whig Party, felt repealing the Missouri Compromise was politically reckless and attempting to push slavery by law and force into territories where most settlers predictably were unlikely to want it endangered slavery everywhere, even in the South.
Elections to the 34th United States Congress
Elections to the House of Representatives were held in thirty-one states for all 234 seats between August 4, 1854, and November 6, 1855. Each state legislature separately set a date to elect members to the House of Representatives before the 34th Congress convened its first session on December 3, 1855.
These elections were among the most disruptive in American history, bringing the total collapse of the Second Party System. Candidates opposed to the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the administration, included disaffected Democratic voters, won widely in the North from April 1854 through November 1855, but the Whig Party did not reap the benefit. By 1854, most leading national Whigs, e.g., Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, had died, and the party had limited success in recent national elections. The Whigs were associated with big business and seen as elitist and unresponsive to the concerns of the American people over slavery, immigration, industrialization, and monopoly power. Instead, the Whig Party began to disintegrate in all but a handful of states, and new Representatives were elected on a range of oppositional tickets, including the nativist American Party (better known as "Know Nothings"), the People's Party in Indiana, the Anti-Nebraska party in Ohio, and the abolitionist Republican Party in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Maine. Many new anti-administration representatives were elected on a fusion ticket with support from multiple parties, and many were political novices who frankly admitted they had not expected to be elected.
Taken together, the opposition parties, including the Whigs and the old anti-slavery Free Soil Party, won an estimated net gain of 69 seats nationwide and made up a sizable majority of the House in the 34th Congress. However, due to the confused and overlapping nature of the anti-Nebraska opposition, contemporaries and historians have had difficulty defining the precise makeup of the 34th Congress. The Congressional Globe failed to list party labels in its opening session guide, and according to historian George H. Mayer, "When the votes were counted... the Democrats knew that they had lost, but nobody knew who had won." The anti-Nebraska coalition also had a wide range of positions on slavery, from abolitionists like Joshua Giddings, to former Whigs sympathetic to the slave-dependent economic order, like Solomon G. Haven. Representatives-elect also varied in the importance they placed on slavery as an issue. Many of the American Party representatives-elect, though opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, prioritized the issue of immigration and were willing to compromise with pro-Nebraska Democrats in order to gain support for immigration restriction or anti-Catholic measures.
Bleeding Kansas and American Party split
As the 34th Congress prepared to meet in its first session, scheduled for December 1855, tensions between Kansas settlers came to a head in the outbreak of political violence. In a conflict which would later come to be known as "Bleeding Kansas," the status of slavery was violently disputed between anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery Border Ruffians from neighboring Missouri. The settlement of Kansas and especially the activism of emigrant aid companies like the New England Emigrant Aid Company heightened national attention on slavery and Kansas. In June 1855, the national American Party council split over the issue of slavery into its northern and southern wings. As autumn approached, anti-slavery activists and journalists began to congregate in Washington in hopes of organizing the House under an anti-slavery majority. These efforts were boosted on the eve of the opening session, when the administration Democrats adopted a caucus resolution authored by J. Glancy Jones of Pennsylvania which severely denounced nativism and the Know Nothing movement, thus leaving the southern American representatives-elect without any potential coalition partner.
Despite these apparent advantages, organizing anti-slavery men behind a single candidate before the vote failed. Representative-elect Timothy C. Day privately remarked, "There are about thirty modest men who think the country needs their services in the Speaker's chair. To get rid of this swarm of patriots will take time." They could only agree to a resolution presented by Joshua Giddings, to oppose any candidate who was not "pledged ... to organize the standing committees of the House by placing on each a majority of the friends of freedom."
Process and conventions
The speaker is the presiding officer of the U.S. House of Representatives. The House elects its speaker at the beginning of each new Congress (i.e., ) or when a speaker dies, resigns, or is removed from the position intra-term. Since 1839, the House has elected speakers by roll call vote. Following an election, there being no speaker, the outgoing clerk summons, convenes, and calls the House to order. They then order and oversee the election of a speaker of the House.
Upon winning election, the new speaker is immediately sworn in by the dean of the U.S. House of Representatives, the chamber's longest-serving member. The new speaker then administers the oath en masse to the rest of the members of the House.
To be elected speaker, a candidate typically must receive an absolute majority of the votes cast, as opposed to an absolute majority of the full membership of the House. A variation in the number of votes necessary to win a given election might arise due to vacancies, absentees, or members being present but not voting.
Multiple roll calls had been necessary eleven times since 1789. This had happened most recently in 1849, when Howell Cobb was elected by a plurality on the 63rd ballot, a record at the time.
Election of the speaker The election for speaker began on December 3, 1855, at the start of the 34th Congress.
At the opening of the session, George W. Jones of Tennessee moved to proceed viva voce to an election of a speaker.
Candidates Before balloting began, candidates were placed into nomination, though a candidate need not be nominated to receive votes or win the election. The candidates placed into nomination were: Nathaniel Prentiss Banks of Massachusetts, nominated by Alexander De Witt Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio, nominated by Benjamin F. Leiter Henry M. Fuller of Pennsylvania, nominated by Jonathan Knight Humphrey Marshall of Kentucky, nominated by Thomas R. Whitney of New York Alexander C. M. Pennington of New Jersey, nominated by James Bishop William Alexander Richardson of Illinois, nominated by George W. Jones of Tennessee
Richardson stood as the formally nominated candidate of the Democratic caucus as leader of the minority. Banks, Campbell, Fuller, and Pennington stood as anti-Nebraska candidates opposed to the extension of slavery, while Marshall stood as a southern, pro-Nebraska American Party candidate. The anti-Nebraska faction split regionally, with Banks leading New England, Campbell leading Ohio and the Great Lakes, and Fuller and Pennington supported by their home states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, respectively.
Balloting
December 3–6: Early ballots From the first ballot, it became clear that the anti-Nebraska majority were completely divided. Seventeen anti-Nebraska candidates polled votes, with none receiving over a quarter of the total. Richardson led the first ballot with 74 votes, with Campbell leading the opposition at 55. Marshall received 39 votes, Banks received 22, Fuller received 18, and Pennington received 7. Two more ballots were taken with similar results. To further confuse matters, four anti-Nebraska Democrats voted with their party for Richardson and three anti-slavery Know Nothings voted for Marshall.