The drama unfolding in the House — with no speaker in place after seven votes as Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) struggles to win over dissidents in his own party — may seem extraordinary to us today. But while this hasn’t happened in a century, such protracted contests were common in the era before the Civil War.
The most famous of these battles, the 1855-1856 speaker election, lasted for 133 ballots over nearly two months. It concluded with an abandonment of the majority-rule principle and helped solidify the creation of a new major party in American politics — ironically, the Republican Party that is now so fractured over another speakership vote (though the GOP’s politics have changed much in the ensuing 157 years). That House battle in 1855-1856 offers clues about how today’s situation might resolve itself and what the lasting impact might be.
In some ways, the seeds for the 1855-1856 tussle were sown six years earlier.
In December 1849, a small bloc from the antislavery Free Soil Party managed to secure sufficient seats in the House to hold the balance of power in a closely divided chamber. Rejecting both major parties, the Whigs and Democrats, as equally beholden to the interests of enslavers, a band of about a dozen Free Soilers refused to allow the House to organize without gaining concessions on key committee assignments. They wanted placements that they thought would, at a minimum, ensure that antislavery legislation reached the House floor for a vote — in particular, bills repealing the fugitive slave law, prohibiting slavery’s territorial expansion and abolishing slavery in Washington.
The stalemate ended after three weeks, when enough members from both major parties came together to thwart this vision and agree to elect a speaker by plurality instead of a majority. Each side believed that it could win such a vote — although the Democrats proved to be better voter counters when, on the 63rd ballot, the House selected Georgia enslaver Howell Cobb as speaker. Nonetheless, the Free Soilers had showcased both their antislavery policy demands and the importance of House speaker elections as a venue to gain the nation’s political attention and perhaps shape legislation. Those lessons were not forgotten when an even more divided Congress convened in December 1855.
That Congress was splintered in numerous directions because of a unique element of 19th-century politics. At the time, congressmen were elected many months or even a year (it varied by state) before the next Congress would sit, and during the interim much could change.
That’s precisely what happened before Congress convened in 1855. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Stephen Douglas (D-Ill.) that opened up the Kansas territory to slavery. The law provoked a swift and powerful backlash in the North — destroying what was left of the northern Whig Party and profoundly destabilizing the Democrats in many places. Seizing on the disarray, antislavery Free Soilers and anti-Catholic nativists in the Know Nothing or American Party vied to build a new party that might emerge as the proslavery Democrats’ primary challenger. Many of the Free Soilers vigorously advocated for a new coalition first called the anti-Nebraska movement, before soon becoming known as the Republican Party.
This flux meant that when Congress finally reconvened in December of 1855, there wasn’t a clear majority party. It was obvious that Democrats were in the minority. But the opposition was split among anti-Nebraska members, or Republicans, and Know Nothings, or American Party members — some of whom had run for office (months prior) touting their rejection of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and others of whom were former Whigs from the Upper South or mid-Atlantic regions seeking to make the American Party a force for conservative proslavery unionism. No one knew if these disparate blocs could coalesce behind someone to run the House.
That set the stage for a protracted struggle, with the chamber voting multiple times nearly every day. By the sixth day and the 30th ballot, Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts emerged as the key anti-Nebraska candidate. Banks held appeal for both antislavery figures and northern nativists. He had been elected as an anti-Nebraska Know Nothing, but his colleagues generally perceived Banks as being affiliated with the latter movement more out of political expediency (the Know Nothings dominated Massachusetts politics in 1854 and 1855) than out of a principled preference for the American Party over the Republicans. Once antislavery figures made their commitment to Banks, they steadfastly supported him over scores more ballots with Banks coming as close as six votes short of a majority.
But he could draw no closer, and as the House session wore on for weeks and then months without organization, members proposed a variety of desperate proposals to resolve the impasse. These included giving every member an up-or-down vote alphabetically until one received a majority, forcing the entire House to resign or banning meat, drink and fire in hopes of making further winter deadlock unbearable.
Ultimately, the solution finally agreed upon, after months of unsuccessful (and unpaid) balloting, was a reprisal of the 1849 plan; on Feb. 2, 1856, the House again resolved to choose a speaker by plurality, with some proslavery Democrats believing incorrectly that they had handpicked a candidate that enough anti-Democratic Southerners from multiple parties would support. Instead, on the 133rd ballot, Banks finally broke through with 103 of 214 votes amid deafening cheers, cries and waving of handkerchiefs from the galleries.
No mere procedural victory, Republicans securing control of the House ensured that for the first time in American history, an antislavery party (however moderate) would control one house of Congress. They would now be able to report antislavery legislation to the floor for debate (even if opposition in the Senate, or the prospect of a presidential veto, meant the chances of enacting such legislation were slim). The speakership fight solidified the Republican Party as the clear second party in the North, far eclipsing the American Party. Later that year, Republican presidential candidate John C. Fremont well outpolled both Democratic victor James Buchanan and the American Party nominee, ex-president Millard Fillmore, in the North.
The resort to a plurality vote offers a clue about a possible outcome to the 2023 fight if it drags on long enough — though it remains to be seen if today’s House would ever adopt a plurality election, especially given that there is a clear majority party. It would take the support of either nearly all the Republicans, or a belief by Democrats and one group of Republicans that the outcome of such a vote would benefit them in some tangible way.
But there are other lessons to glean from the 1855-1856 fight. It exposes how important control of the floor is and how any victory will prove to be valuable, no matter how narrow. The solidification of a new party coalition in 1856 also signals how extended conflicts over the speakership can have ramifications for party politics beyond the mechanics of who controls the House. The fallout from the fight — regardless of whether McCarthy eventually wins — will help define what the Republican Party stands for and who controls its politics for years to come.