Political Career
Banks served as a Democrat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1849 to 1853, and was speaker in 1851 and 1852; he was president of the state Constitutional Convention of 1853, and in the same year was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a coalition candidate of Democrats and Free-Soilers. In 1854, he was reelected as a Know Nothing.
At the opening of the Thirty-Fourth Congress, men from several parties opposed to slavery's spread gradually united in supporting Banks for speaker. After the longest and one of the most bitter speakership contests on record, lasting from December 3, 1855 to February 2, 1856, Banks was chosen on the 133rd ballot. This has been called the first national victory of the Republican party. He gave antislavery men important posts in Congress for the first time, and cooperated with investigations of both the Kansas conflict and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner. Yet, he also left a legacy of fairness in his appointments and decisions. He played a key role in 1856 in bringing forward John C. Frémont as a moderate Republican presidential nominee. As a part of this process, Banks declined, as pre-arranged, the presidential nomination of those Know-Nothings, opposed to the spread of slavery, in favor of Republican Frémont. For the next few years, Banks was supported by a coalition of Know-Nothings and Republicans in Massachusetts. His interest in the Know-Nothing legislative agenda was minimal, supporting only some tougher residency requirements for voting.
Re-elected in 1856 as a Republican, he resigned his seat in December 1857, and was governor of Massachusetts from 1858 to 1860, during a period of government contraction forced by the depression of those years. He made a serious attempt to gain the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, but discord within his party in Massachusetts, a residence in a "safe" Republican state, and his Know-Nothing past doomed his chances. He then was briefly resident director in Chicago, Illinois, of the Illinois Central Railroad, hired primarily to promote sale of the railroad's extensive lands.
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