The last time a speaker election took more than one ballot was in 1923, when Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-Mass.) was reelected on the ninth ballot.
But the longest speaker vote began on Dec. 3, 1855, when the 34th Congress convened. Democrats controlled the Senate, but no party controlled the House after the disintegration of the Whig Party. About a third of House members were Democrats. The rest belonged to a mix of parties, including the new Republican Party. Many were members of the secretive American Party, also known as the Know Nothing party.
On the first day, 21 candidates vied for the speakership. Four votes were taken. The early leader was Rep. William Richardson (D-Ill.), who favored permitting future states to allow slavery, with 74 votes, far short of the 113 needed for a majority. A few days later, antislavery members lined up behind the American Party’s “Bobbin Boy” Banks, who as a boy worked in a textile factory carrying bobbins of thread to the women who operated the looms. The 39-year-old Banks, the New York Herald reported, was “a good looking man” with a stiff, puritanical manner who “is even said never to have drank a glass of liquor in his life.”
On the 33rd tally, in mid-December, Banks received 100 votes to Richardson’s 73, and the deadlock continued into the new year as the slavery debate heated up. “This is not a mere contest as to a Speaker of the House; it is but an incident in a long and arduous struggle which is to determine whether slavery will be the pole star of our National career,” Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune wrote.
The fiery floor debate turned violent outside the Capitol in late January as Greeley, who supported Banks, was leaving a House session. A burly man approached the Tribune publisher and “struck me a stunning blow on the right side of my head and followed it by two or three more, as rapidly as possible,” Greeley wrote. The attacker was anti-Banks Rep. Albert Rust (D-Ark.).
Finally, on Feb. 1, 1856, Democrats adopted a new strategy. First, they backed a new speaker candidate, proslavery Rep. William Aiken Jr. (D-S.C.), the 50-year-old son of railroad magnate William Aiken Sr., after whom Aiken, S.C., was named. Second, Democratic leaders announced that they would propose the next day a previously rejected resolution to elect a speaker with only a plurality vote. Under this plan, if a majority of members failed to elect a speaker in three consecutive votes, the candidate who got the most votes on a fourth tally would win.