In the hotly contested Speaker's election, Democrat John Millson of Virginia comes to within eighteen votes of success

Representatives had been meeting for more than two weeks on the usually routine task of electing a Speaker.  The sectional crisis made this year very different, however.  After the seventeenth ballot, southerners and other Democrats rallied behind John Millson of Virginia.  Millson fell just eighteen votes short of the number needed for election, the closest a non-Republican would come, and the struggle went on. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: the origins of central state authority in America, 1859-1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52.
    Date Certainty
    Exact
    Type
    Lawmaking/Litigating
    How to Cite This Page: "In the hotly contested Speaker's election, Democrat John Millson of Virginia comes to within eighteen votes of success," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/30705.