The United States presidential election of 1844 was the 15th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, November 1, to Wednesday, December 4, 1844. Democrat James K. Polk defeated Whig Henry Clay in a close contest that turned on the controversial issue of slavery expansion through the annexation of the Republic of Texas.[2][3][4]
The general election of 1844 took place in the midst of increasingly bitter congressional disputes over anti-slavery agitation that revealed how fragile the peaceful coexistence of free-soil and slave-soil interests within the United States really was.[5] The campaign themes arose in direct response to incumbent President John Tyler's pursuit of Texas annexation as a slave state so as to undermine the unity of the Whig and Democratic parties in his bid to retain the White House.[6]
The Whig Party nominee Henry Clay adopted an anti-annexation platform on the principle of preserving North-South sectional unity and to avoid war by respecting Mexico's claims to Texas.[7][8] Clay's attempts to finesse his anti-annexation position on Texas alienated many voters in the South and West where annexation support was strongest,[9] while some Northern Whigs in swing states shifted support to the anti-slavery Liberty Party.[10]
Democrat Martin Van Buren, the former president and presumptive presidential contender for his party, was rejected as nominee at the Democratic National Convention after he failed to satisfy the demands of southern Democrat expansionists for a leader favoring the immediate acquisition of Texas.[11]
In place of Van Buren, Democrat James K. Polk emerged as America's first dark horse nominee.[12] He ran on a platform that embraced America's popular commitment to territorial expansionism, often referred to as Manifest Destiny.[13] Polk successfully linked the US-British boundary dispute over the partition of Oregon Territory with the Texas annexation debate. In doing so, the Democratic Party nominee united the anti-slavery Northern expansionists, who demanded Oregon as free-soil, with pro-slavery Southern expansionists, who insisted on acquiring Texas as a slave state. In doing so, Polk narrowly outpolled the Whig Party nominee Clay by less than 40,000 votes.[14][15]
Party alliances were shaken by the Texas Controversy, but partisan loyalties among Congressional Democrats rallied sufficiently in the aftermath of Polk's victory to pass a joint House-Senate resolution on Texas annexation.[16] Texas would enter the Union as the 28th state in 1846.[17]
This was the last presidential election to be held on different days in different states. Starting with the presidential election of 1848, all states held the election on the same date in November. It was also the only presidential election in which the winner, Polk, lost both his birth state of North Carolina and his state of residence, Tennessee, (which he lost by only 123 votes) prior to Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election. It is the only presidential election in which both major party nominees were former Speakers of the House.
