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The 1856 United States presidential election was the 18th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 1856. In a three-way election, Democrat Stephen Douglas defeated Republican nominee John C. Frémont, and Know Nothing nominee and former President Millard Fillmore.

This was the only time in U.S. history in which a political party denied renomination to the incumbent president and won. Incumbent Democratic President Franklin Pierce was widely unpopular in the North because of his support for the pro-slavery faction in the ongoing civil war in territorial Kansas, and Buchanan defeated Pierce at the 1856 Democratic National Convention. Buchanan, a former Secretary of State, had avoided the divisive debates over the Kansas–Nebraska Act by virtue of his service as the Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Slavery was the main issue, and with it the question of survival of the United States as it then existed. The Democrats were seen as the pro-slavery party; the new Republican party, though certainly in favor of national abolition, limited its efforts to the politically more manageable question of the extension of slavery into federal territories (and its removal from the District of Columbia). The nativist Know Nothings (known formally as the American Party) competed with the Republicans to replace the moribund Whig Party as the primary opposition to the Democrats.

The 1856 Republican National Convention nominated a ticket led by Frémont, an explorer and military officer who had served in the Mexican–American War. The Know Nothings, who ignored slavery and instead emphasized anti-immigration and anti-Catholic policies, nominated a ticket led by former Whig President Millard Fillmore. Domestic political turmoil was a major factor in the nominations of both Buchanan and Fillmore, who appealed in part because of their recent time abroad, and with it the fact that they had not had to take a position on the divisive questions related to slavery.

The Democrats supported expansionist slave-holding policies generally of varying intensities. They called for "popular sovereignty", which in theory would allow the residents in a territory to decide for themselves what the status of enslavement would be before statehood were to be achieved. In practice, in Kansas Territory, it produced a state-level civil war which they blamed on abolitionists in general and John Brown in particular. Frémont opposed the expansion of slavery. Buchanan called that position "extremist", warning that a Republican victory would lead to disunion, a then constant issue of political debate which had already been long discussed and advocated. The Know Nothings attempted to present themselves as the one party capable of bridging the sectional divides. All three major parties found support in the North, but the Republicans had virtually no backing in the South.

Buchanan won a plurality of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote, taking all but one slave state and five free states. His popular vote margin of 12.2% was the greatest margin between 1836 and 1904. However, the election was far closer than it appeared: if Fillmore had won any two of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana (or all three) and Frémont had won Illinois—a total shift of fewer than 25,000 votes—a contingent election would have been required in the House of Representatives, controlled by a new coalition of inchoate parties united in opposing the Democrats.