Your questions about Republican presidents answered from the record

Every family has one. Maybe it is your brother-in-law, maybe it is the neighbor with the flag out front, maybe it is a grandchild with a school assignment due Monday. Somebody asks, "Wait, who was the first Republican president?" and three adults give three confident answers. Folks, that is how you know a fact needs checking: when everybody at the table is sure and nobody agrees.

The good news is that most questions about the party's presidents have short answers that anyone can verify. No polls, no predictions. Just dates, names and numbers from the public record. Below are fourteen of the questions readers ask most, answered in order, with the arithmetic shown where there is arithmetic. If you want to learn how to check any of them yourself, the last section points you to the method.

The beginnings

Who was the first Republican presidential nominee?

John C. Frémont of California, in 1856. The party was only two years old. It had been born in 1854 in the uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a story we tell in The Little Schoolhouse in Ripon and the Oak Grove in Jackson, 1854. The first national convention met in Philadelphia in June 1856 and nominated Frémont, an explorer and former senator who had been a military officer in the West. He lost the general election to the Democrat, James Buchanan. But the new party carried most of the free states, which told everyone in politics that something big was coming.

Who was the first Republican president?

Abraham Lincoln. He won the election of November 1860 and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. He ran on a platform of keeping slavery out of the new territories and defending the Union, a program laid out in Abraham Lincoln ran a party of free soil, free labor and free men. He was re-elected in 1864 and was assassinated in April 1865, which brings us to the next set of questions.

It is worth pausing on the date. Seven Southern states had voted to leave the Union by the time Lincoln took the oath, and the shots at Fort Sumter came on April 12, 1861, about five weeks into his first term. The first Republican president took office with the country already coming apart and spent virtually all of it at war. That is the context for everything else he did, including the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, and the push for the 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865.

How many Republican presidents have there been?

Counting people, not terms, there have been 19, through Donald Trump. Here they are in order: Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump. Count them off on your fingers: that is 19. The numbering you sometimes hear, "the 45th president" and "the 47th president," counts Trump's two non-consecutive terms separately, which is why the ordinal numbers of the presidency and the number of men are different.

Death and resignation

Which Republican presidents died in office?

Four: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Harding. Eight presidents in all have died in office, so exactly half of them were Republicans.

• Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, and died the next morning, April 15.
• James Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, in a Washington railroad station and died on September 19, 1881. He had taken the oath on March 4, so his presidency lasted a little under 200 days, the second shortest in history after William Henry Harrison's month in 1841.
• William McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and died on September 14.
• Warren Harding died on August 2, 1923, in San Francisco, at the end of a western trip that had included a visit to Alaska. He died of natural causes, not violence.

The first three were assassinated. That is a sobering fact about the 1860s through the 1900s, and a reminder that political violence is not new and is never acceptable. The other four presidents to die in office were William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor (of the Whig Party), and Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy (Democrats).

Which Republican president resigned?

Richard Nixon, and he is the only president of any party to do so. He announced his decision in a television address on August 8, 1974, and the resignation took effect at noon on August 9, after the Watergate scandal had cost him the support of his own party in Congress. Our day-by-day account is in watergate in twelve dates and the one that finally ended it. A month later, on September 8, 1974, his successor pardoned him, a decision explained in Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and paid for it at the ballot box.

One related fact is often confused with this. Spiro Agnew, Nixon's Vice President, resigned separately on October 10, 1973, after pleading no contest to a tax charge amid a corruption investigation that had nothing to do with Watergate. That is how Ford came to be Vice President, which we will get to in a moment.

Landslides and successors

Which Republicans won 49 states?

Two: Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984. Both lost only one state and the District of Columbia.

• Nixon in 1972 lost only Massachusetts (14 electoral votes) and D.C. (3). His opponent, George McGovern, therefore got 14 plus 3, which is 17 electoral votes. Nixon won 520, and one elector from Virginia voted for someone else, so the total is 520 plus 17 plus 1, which is 538. (Our piece Nixon's 1972 Landslide and the Birth of the Blue-Collar Republican looks at the coalition.)
• Reagan in 1984 lost only Minnesota (10 electoral votes), the home state of his opponent Walter Mondale, and D.C. (3). Mondale got 10 plus 3, which is 13. Reagan won 525. And 525 plus 13 is 538, which is the total number of electoral votes.

No candidate has ever carried all 50 states. A word of caution for the reader who likes round numbers: a 49-state sweep is a statement about the map, and it says less than you would think about what the winner can do in office. Both men faced a House of Representatives controlled by the other party for their entire time in office, and both had to bargain. For how the counting works, see How the Electoral College Works, From Election Day to the Joint Session.

Which Republican presidents took office without being elected to the office?

Four, and each story is different.

1. Chester Arthur (1881). Elected Vice President in 1880 on Garfield's ticket, he became president when Garfield died. His story is in Chester Arthur was a machine politician who gave America its civil service.
2. Theodore Roosevelt (1901). Elected Vice President in 1900, he took over when McKinley died, and won his own term in 1904.
3. Calvin Coolidge (1923). Elected Vice President in 1920, he was sworn in by his father, a notary public, at the family home in Vermont after Harding died, and won his own term in 1924.
4. Gerald Ford (1974). The most unusual case. Ford was never elected either president or vice president. Under the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, a vacancy in the vice presidency is filled by a presidential nomination confirmed by both houses of Congress. After Agnew resigned, Nixon nominated Ford, Congress confirmed him, and he was sworn in as Vice President on December 6, 1973. Then he became President on August 9, 1974. He is the only person to hold both offices without ever being elected to either. He lost the 1976 election.

Arthur, Roosevelt and Coolidge were elected Vice President. Ford was not. That is the difference.

The two-term limit

What did the 22nd Amendment do?

It limits how often a person may be elected president. The text, in plain terms, says: no person shall be elected president more than twice, and no one who has held the office, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which someone else was elected may be elected more than once.

The backstory matters. George Washington declined a third term in 1796, and for roughly 150 years the two-term tradition held as a custom. Franklin Roosevelt broke it, winning in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, and he died in office in April 1945. The Republicans won both houses of Congress in 1946, and the new Congress proposed the amendment on March 21, 1947. The states ratified it on February 27, 1951. It did not apply to the sitting president, Harry Truman. The first president it actually barred from a third term was Dwight Eisenhower, who left office in January 1961. We tell the whole story in Why a Republican Congress Wrote the 22nd Amendment After Four Terms of FDR. Whether the limit is wise is a value question, and conservatives have argued both ways. The case for it is that long tenure concentrates power and that the Washington precedent was worth writing into law. The case against it is that voters, not a constitutional clause, should decide who serves, and that a president in his second term is a lame duck from the first day. The fact, whichever side you take, is the text of the amendment, and it is short enough to read in a minute.

What is the longest a person can serve under the amendment?

Ten years. Do the sum: two elected terms of four years each is eight years. Add up to two years of a predecessor's term, which does not count against a person if it is two years or less. Eight plus two is ten. Someone who serves more than two years of a predecessor's term may be elected only once, so that person's total is a little under eight years at most: nearly four inherited years plus one four-year term.

More questions readers send in

Which Republicans won the presidency while losing the popular vote?

Four have won the Electoral College while finishing second in the national popular vote: Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. Hayes's win in 1876 was the narrowest: 185 electoral votes to 184 for Samuel Tilden, a total of 369. The returns from three Southern states were disputed, and a special Electoral Commission settled the matter. The story is in Hayes, Tilden and the Compromise of 1877 That Ended Reconstruction. All four took office under the rules of the Constitution, and the Electoral College is the way the framers designed the system. You may favor it or oppose it, and that is a value judgment, but it is the law.

Who was the youngest Republican president?

Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when McKinley died and he took the oath in 1901. He remains the youngest person ever to hold the office. John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, was the youngest person ever elected president, at 43.

Which Republican presidents had never held elective office before the White House?

Four: Ulysses Grant, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower and Donald Trump. Grant and Eisenhower were generals; Hoover was a mining engineer, a relief administrator and Secretary of Commerce; Trump was a businessman. Each came to the presidency through a different door than the usual path through a governor's mansion or the Senate.

Which Republican presidents served two full terms?

Four completed two full terms: Ulysses Grant (1869 to 1877), Dwight Eisenhower (1953 to 1961), Ronald Reagan (1981 to 1989) and George W. Bush (2001 to 2009). Each of those is eight years, and the arithmetic is the same every time: 1877 minus 1869 is 8. Three others were elected twice and did not finish the second term. Lincoln was assassinated, McKinley was assassinated, and Nixon resigned. Theodore Roosevelt and Coolidge each served more than one full term's worth of years by adding an inherited term to an elected one, but each was elected president only once.

Which Republican presidents signed civil rights laws?

Ulysses Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on March 1, 1875, and the enforcement laws of 1870 and 1871 that were aimed at the Ku Klux Klan (see Grant, the Enforcement Acts and the Federal Government's War on the First Klan). Dwight Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 on September 9, 1957, and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 on May 6, 1960. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, but it could not have passed the Senate without Republican votes to end a filibuster, a record covered in The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster.

Where to check any of this

Every date and number above is in the public record, and none of it requires you to trust a blog. Primary sources are free: the Constitution and its amendments, the Statutes at Large and Congress.gov for laws, the Senate and House historical offices for votes, the National Archives for official documents, and the presidential libraries for papers. If you want to do the checking yourself, our walkthrough how to check any claim about a president in under an hour shows the method step by step.

I will add one rule from experience. When a claim about a president sounds too good or too bad, find the date and the document. A claim with no date and no document is a rumor.

The bottom line

• The first Republican nominee was Frémont (1856) and the first Republican president was Lincoln (elected 1860). There have been 19 Republican presidents, counting Trump once.
• Four Republicans died in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding), one resigned (Nixon), and two won 49 states (Nixon, Reagan). Four came to the presidency without a first election to it: Arthur, Roosevelt, Coolidge and Ford.
• The 22nd Amendment, proposed in 1947 and ratified in 1951, limits a person to two elections, and the longest anyone can serve is ten years.
• When you hear a claim about a president at the dinner table, ask for the date and the document. If nobody can supply either, say politely that you will look it up and bring it back.
• Share the answers with the young people in your house. A citizen who knows the record is hard to fool.