In the Balance of Power. Omar H. Ali

       Henry Highland Garnet, 1865

      With the election of 1856, the Republican Party became the second-largest party in the nation. Although the Democratic Party’s candidate, James Buchanan, won the presidential election with 1,838,169 popular votes (45.3 percent), the Republicans’ John C. Frémont received 1,341,264 (33.1 percent) and carried eleven of the sixteen Northern states. The Republicans had quadrupled the highest popular vote received by any third-party presidential candidate up to that point.² The Whigs did not run a national campaign, but the Know Nothing Party’s candidate, Millard Fillmore, received an impressive 874,534 (21.6 percent). Meanwhile, the Political Abolition Party, with limited appeal because of its immediatist stance, received a total of 484 votes. Clearly, a party of immediate abolitionism and black civil and political rights could only go so far.