1855–56 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives election

From December 3, 1855, to February 2, 1856, the incoming House of Representatives held an election for speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. After one hundred and thirty-two inconclusive ballots, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks of Massachusetts was elected over William Aiken Jr. of South Carolina pursuant to a temporary rule permitting a candidate to be elected with a plurality of the vote. The election was dominated by debate over slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and contemporary reaction recognized Banks's victory as the first "Northern victory" in the events leading to the American Civil War.

Following the 1854–55 United States House of Representatives elections, opponents of the incumbent Franklin Pierce administration won a large majority of the seats in the House. However, the anti-administration representatives-elect, grouped together informally as the "Opposition," had little common ground and no common party organization. Five Opposition candidates were formally nominated, but the race soon coalesced around two Opposition figures, Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts and Henry Mills Fuller of Pennsylvania, against Democratic nominee William Alexander Richardson. Banks gained the formal nomination of the Opposition but repeatedly fell short of a majority of the House as many members of the Opposition, primarily Southern nativists or anti-abolitionists, cast their votes for Fuller or other Opposition candidates. On the final day of balloting, members of Democratic minority agreed to the use of plurality voting, having settled on South Carolina unionist William Aiken Jr. as a compromise candidate who could win the votes of the southern Opposition.