This was the first national election for Martin Van Buren of New York, who was put on the ticket to succeed John Caldwell Calhoun and four years later would succeed Jackson as President. Van Buren faced opposition for the Vice Presidency within his own party, however, and as a result 30 Pennsylvania electors cast ballots for native son William Wilkins.

1. It was the last election until 1988 to result in the elevation of an incumbent Vice President to the nation's highest office.
2. It was the only race in which a major political party intentionally ran several presidential candidates. The Whigs ran three different candidates in different regions of the country, hoping that each would be popular enough to defeat Democratic standard-bearer Martin Van Buren in their respective areas. The House of Representatives could then decide between the competing Whig candidates. This strategy failed: Van Buren won a majority of the electoral vote and became President.
3. This election is the first (and to date only) time in which a Vice Presidential election was thrown into the Senate.

This election was unique in that electors cast votes for four men who had been or would become President of the United States: current President Martin Van Buren; President-elect William Henry Harrison; Vice-President-elect John Tyler, who would succeed Harrison upon his death; and James Polk, who received one electoral vote for Vice President.

Democratic nominee James K. Polk ran on a platform that embraced American territorial expansionism, an idea soon to be called Manifest Destiny. At their convention, the Democrats called for the annexation of Texas and asserted that the United States had a “clear and unquestionable” claim to “the whole” of Oregon. By informally tying the Oregon boundary dispute to the more controversial Texas debate, the Democrats appealed to both Northern expansionists (who were more adamant about the Oregon boundary) and Southern expansionists (who were more focused on annexing Texas as a slave state). Polk went on to win a narrow victory over Whig candidate Henry Clay, in part because Clay had taken a stand against expansion, although economic issues were also of great importance. (The slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” is often incorrectly associated with this election; it first appeared in 1845.)

This was the last presidential election to be held on different days in different states, as starting with the presidential election of 1848 all states held the election on the same date in November.

Presidential Candidate	Party	Home State	Popular Vote (%)*	Electoral Vote (%)	Running Mate
Zachary Taylor	Whig	Louisiana	1,361,393 (47.3%)	163 (56.2%)	Millard Fillmore
Lewis Cass	Democratic	Michigan	1,223,460 (42.5%)	127 (43.8%)	William Butler
Martin Van Buren	Free Soil	New York	291,501 (10.1%)	0 (0.0%)	Charles Adams, Sr.
Other	(n/a)	(n/a)	2,830 (0.1%)	0 (0.0%)	(n/a)
TOTAL			2,879,184 (100%)	290 (100%)

The Whigs in 1846-47 had focused all their energies on condemning Polk's war policies. They had to quickly reverse course. In February 1848 Polk surprised everyone with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war and gave the U.S. vast new territories (including California and most of 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 war or criticize Polk, and 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 almost in 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; they appeared almost certain winners unless the Whigs picked Taylor. "It is doubtful whether we can beat the scoundrels next Pres. Election," complained one Whig leader (John Defrees). "The war will have been ended -- and an immense acquisition of Land will be pointed to as the result of Democracy -- the Land stealing, even among our best Christians, is popular!" [Holt p. 312] Taylor's victory made him one of only two Whigs to be elected President before the party ceased to exist in the 1850's, the other Whig to be elected President was William Henry Harrison, who had also been a general and war hero.

Pierce and running mate William King would go on to win what was at the time one of the nation's largest electoral victories, trouncing Scott and his vice presidential nominee, William Graham of North Carolina, 254 electoral votes to 42. After the 1852 election the Whig Party would cease to exist; it was soon replaced as the Democratic Party's primary opposition by the new Republican Party.

The incumbent President, Franklin Pierce, was defeated in his effort to be renominated by the Democrats, who instead selected James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; this was thanks in part to the fact that the Kansas-Nebraska Act divided Democrats. 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, over Senator William H. Seward, and the Know-Nothings nominated former President Millard Fillmore of New York. Perennial candidate Daniel Pratt also ran.

Frémont received fewer 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.

The immediate result of Lincoln's victory was the secession of South Carolina and other states, which was rejected as illegal by the then-current President, James Buchanan and President-elect Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln ran against the Democratic candidate, George B. McClellan, and the Radical Republican Party candidate, John C. Frémont. McClellan was the "peace candidate" but did not personally believe in his party's platform. Frémont abandoned his political campaign in September 1864, after he brokered a political deal in which Lincoln removed U.S. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair from office.

The election of 1864 was conducted during the Civil War, and as such, none of the states which made up the Confederate states participated.

Republicans across the country were jittery during the summer of 1864. Confederate forces had triumphed at the Battle of Mansfield and the Battle of the Crater. In addition, the war was continuing to take a very high toll. The prospect of a long, never-ending war started to make the "negotiated peace" offered by the Democrats look more desirable. But then the Democrats had to confront the severe internal strains within their party at the Democratic National Convention. Finally, with William Tecumseh Sherman marching inexorably toward Atlanta and Ulysses S. Grant pushing Lee into the outer defenses of Richmond, it became increasingly obvious that a Union military victory was inevitable and close at hand.

The Lincoln/Johnson ticket ran with the slogan “Don't change horses in the middle of a stream.” The Republican party name was changed to Union, to appeal to War Democrats; the new name vanished after the election. Johnson, however, never became a Republican.

The Republican/Union party made an all-out effort to depict the Democrats in the worse way possible. They ridiculed McClellan for his pacifist platform and denounced Democrats as traitorous Copperheads. On November 8, Lincoln won by over 400,000 popular votes and easily clinched an electoral majority. Several states allowed their citizens serving as soldiers in the field to cast ballots, a first in United States history. Soldiers in the Army gave Lincoln more than 70% of their vote.

On November 29, 1872, after the popular vote but before the electoral college cast its votes, Greeley died. As a result, electors previously committed to Greeley voted for four different candidates for President, and eight different candidates for Vice President. Greeley himself received three posthumous electoral votes, but these votes were disallowed by Congress.

Henry Wilson, who was chosen by the Republicans to succeed Schuyler Colfax as Vice President, died on November 22, 1875.

Create a free website at Webs.com