NH
A-26
VT 8 ME
C-5
7
9
Cl-4
J-1
MA
15
UNORGANIZED
NY
MI TERR.
RI
TERRITORY
CT 4
PA
8
28
NJ
IL
IN
OH
8
J-2
16
A-1 5
VA
DE C-2
A-1
MO
KY
24
3
14
NC
MD J-7
TN
15
A-3
AR
11
C-1
SC
TERR.
AL
11
MS
GA
F
5
u
3
9
tur
LA
e Boundary
J-3
A-2
FL
TERR.
Electoral Vote
Popular Vote
Number %
Number %
Jackson
(Democratic Republican)
99
38
152,901
42
J. Q. Adams
84
32
114,023
32
(Democratic Republican)
Crawford
41
16
46,979
13
(Democratic Republican)
Learning
Clay
37
14
47,217
13
(Democratic Republican)
Cengage©
MAP 11.1 Presidential Election, 1824
Voting in the four-cornered contest of 1824 was starkly sectional. John Quincy Adams carried his native New England, while Crawford and Clay carried only a few states in their own sections. Only Andrew Jackson enjoyed national support: He carried states in every section but New England, and he ran a strong second in many of the states that were awarded to other candidates.
Jackson predicted a “bargain & sale” of the presidency. Afterward, Jackson
declared, “the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.” “So you see,” Jackson said, “the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will
receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same.” Others in Washington agreed. Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina denounced the “monstrous union between Clay & Adams,” and Louis McLane of Delaware declared the coalition of
Clay and Adams utterly “unnatural & preposterous.” Eventually, Clay challenged Virginia Senator John Randolph, one of his nastiest critics, to a duel. Clay’s shot passed harmlessly through Randolph’s flowing coat, and Randolph fired a gentlemanly shot into the air. But the charge of corruption would follow Clay for the
rest of his political life.
Jacksonian
Andrew Jackson regarded the intrigues that robbed him of
Melodrama
the presidency in 1825 as the culmination of a long train of
corruption that the nation had suffered over the previous
10 years. Although in the campaign he had made only vague policy statements, he
had firm ideas of what had gone wrong with the republic. In 1821, after having
been “betrayed” by members of Monroe’s cabinet over his raid into Florida,
Jackson had retired to his plantation near Nashville to ponder the state of the
nation and fill page after page with what he called “memorandums.” (This was
Adams versus Jackson
387
the kind of gaffe that appalled his educated eastern opponents and pleased nearly everyone else.)
A frontier planter with a deep distrust of banks, Jackson claimed that self-
serving miscreants in the Bank of the United States brought on the Panic of 1819.
The national debt, he insisted, was another source of corruption. It must be paid off and never allowed to recur. The federal government under James Monroe was filled
with swindlers, and in the name of a vague nationalism they were taking power for themselves and scheming against the liberties of the people. The politicians had
been bought off, said Jackson, and had attempted—through “King Caucus”—to
select a president by backstairs deals rather than by popular election. Finally, in 1825, they had stolen the presidency outright.
Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Jackson sensed that something
had gone wrong with the republic—that selfishness and intrigue had corrupted the
government. In the language of revolutionary republicanism, which Jackson had
learned as a boy in the Carolina backwoods and would speak throughout his life,
a corrupt power once again threatened to snuff out liberty.
In his memorandums, Jackson set against the designs of that power the classic
republican safeguard: a virtuous citizenry. Unlike most of his revolutionary forebears, however, he believed that government should follow the will of popular
majorities. An aroused public, he said, was the republic’s best hope: “My fervent prayers are that our republican government may be perpetual, and the people
alone by their virtue, and independent exercise of their free suffrage can make it perpetual.”
More completely than any of his rivals, Jackson had captured the rhetoric of
the revolutionary republic. And, with his fixation on secrecy, corruption, and
intrigues, he transformed both that rhetoric and his own biography into popular
melodrama. Finally, with a political alchemy that his rivals never understood,
Jackson submerged old notions of republican citizenship into a firm faith in
majoritarian democracy: Individuals might become selfish and corrupt, he
believed, but a democratic majority was, by its very nature, opposed to corruption and governmental excess. Thus, the republic was safe only when governed by the
will of the majority. The Corrupt Bargain of 1825 had made that clear: Either
the people or political schemers would rule.
ADAMS VERSUS JACKSON
While Jackson plotted revenge, John Quincy Adams assumed the duties of the pres-
idency. He was well prepared. The son of a Federalist president, he had been an
extraordinarily successful secretary of state under Monroe, guiding American diplomacy in the postwar world.
Nationalism in
In the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817 and the British-
an International
American Convention of 1818, Secretary of State John
Arena
Quincy Adams helped pacify the Great Lakes, restore
American fishing rights off the coast of Canada, and
draw the U.S.–Canadian boundary west to the Rocky Mountains—actions that
388