The Contenders :: history

The Contenders For the presidential election of 1856, the Democrats nominated James Buchanan and John Breckenridge, the newly formed Republican party nominated John Fremont and William Drayton, the American [or Know-Nothing] party nominated former president Millard Fillmore and Andrew Donelson, and the Abolition Party nominated Gerrit Smith and Samuel McFarland. Buchanan started his political career as a state representative in Pennsylvania, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1821, appointed minister to Russia in 1832, and elected US Senator in 1834. He was appointed Secretary of State in 1845 by President Polk and in that capacity helped forge the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War. He was appointed by President Polk as minister to Great Britain in 1853. As such, he, along with the American ministers to Spain and France, issued the Ostend Manifesto, which recommended the annexation of Cuba to the United States. This endeared him to southerners, who assumed Cuba would be a slave state. He was one of several northerners supported over the years by southern Democrats for being amenable to slaveholders' interests, a situation originating with Martin van Buren. Buchanan's two major rivals for the nomination, Franklin Pierce and Stephen Douglas, were both politically tainted by the bloodshed in Kansas. Buchanan was untainted, since he had been abroad during most of the controversy. Even so, he did not secure the nomination until the seventeenth ballot. Fremont was best known as an explorer and a war hero. He surveyed the land between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, explored the Oregon Trail territories and crossed the Sierra Madres into the Sacramento Valley. As a captain in the Army, he returned to California and helped the settlers overthrow Mexican rule in what became known as the Bear Flag Revolution, a sidebar to the Mexican War. He was elected as one of California's first two Senators. The infant Republican party was born from the ashes of the Whig party, which had suffered spontaneous combustion as a result of the slavery issue. The party's convention was a farce; only northern states and a few border slave states sent delegates. Sticking to their Whig roots, they nominated a war hero, albeit a minor one. William Drayton's runner-up for the VP slot was Abraham Lincoln. Fillmore, having been the thirteenth president following the death of Zachary Taylor, found himself representing the American party after many northern delegates left the convention over a rift caused by the slavery issue.