Anything for a Vote Page 4

  HENRY CLAY A native Kentuckian, Clay had been the leader of the War Hawks in 1812 and was now a brilliant Speaker of the House. He was an ardent patriot who wanted a national bank and a standing army. He was also a debonair gambler known for holding card games that lasted until all hours.

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Adams boasted distinguished bloodlines—his father was the second president of the United States—as well as a notable career. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812, and had labored tirelessly as James Monroe’s secretary of state. Unlike his handsome opponents, however, Adams was short, bald, and had a constantly running eye. Even he described himself as “a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners.”

  THE CAMPAIGN

  In a word, nasty. Rumors were spread in particular about Adams—that his father, the aging former president, had broken with him politically and that he was selling future patronage appointments in return for votes. Yet people smiled to his face. “My complaint,” he wrote, “is not that attempts were made to tear my reputation to pieces,” but that such slanders “were accompanied by professions of great respect and esteem.”

  After twenty years of sleepy presidential elections, the pamphleteers were relieved to be slinging mud again. They satirized Adams’s sartorial inelegance (he was, admittedly, an eccentric dresser—when he couldn’t find his cravat, he’d sometimes tie a black ribbon around his neck), called Clay a drunkard, and accused Jackson of murder for having executed mutineers in 1813 (charges that would follow Jackson into the next election). Crawford—still running, even though paralyzed and sightless—was accused of malfeasance in his role as treasury secretary.

  If all these charges were true, one politician said, “our presidents, secretaries, and senators are all traitors and pirates.”

  THE WINNER (EVENTUALLY):

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

  The voting of the presidential electors was completed in early December, and it soon became clear that there was still quite a horse race going on. Andrew Jackson pulled ninety-nine electoral votes (he also led in the first popular vote ever, although six out of twenty-four states were still appointing electors in their state legislatures). In close pursuit were Adams with eighty-four electoral votes, William Crawford with forty-one, and Henry Clay at thirty-seven. Since no single candidate had a majority, the outcome of the race would be decided in the House of Representatives, with each state delegation casting one vote. (John C. Calhoun did win the majority of votes for vice president, so his position was a lock regardless of who became president.)

  The voting was scheduled for February 9, 1825, and the candidates set busily to work lining up support in Congress. Since Jackson had received the most electoral votes, many were saying that he should be president, even if the Constitution disagreed.

  The matter was finally resolved when Henry Clay pulled out of the race. He would throw the three states that had voted for him—Ohio, Missouri, and Kentucky—to John Quincy Adams. Clay had probably decided that between Jackson and Adams, the latter would be more likely to strengthen the West by providing money for constructing roads and canals—projects badly needed in the outlying states. Of course, many speculated that the two men had embarked on a “corrupt bargain”—votes for Adams in return for a cabinet position for Clay—but Adams always swore this was not true.

  In any event, when the vote came down on February 9, Adams squeaked out a majority with thirteen states, as opposed to Jackson’s seven and Crawford’s four. He would be president—and the next four years would turn out to be an almost unmitigated disaster.

  TO BE, OR NOT TO BE—PRESIDENT? Like a medieval prince or modern analysand, John Quincy Adams was prone to a deep ambivalence about success. At no time was this more evident than in the election of 1824. “Oh, the winding of the human heart,” he wrote in his diary. “Whether I ought to wish for success is among the greatest uncertainties of the election.” On the one hand, “the object nearest to my heart [is] to bring the whole people of the Union to harmonize together.” On the other hand, winning and losing “are distressing in prospect, and the most formidable is that of success. The humiliation of failure will be so much more than compensated by the safety in which it will leave me that I ought to regard it as a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

  Somehow, one cannot picture opponent Andrew Jackson (who preferred beating up other people to beating up on himself) muttering away in like fashion.

  CLAY VS. JACKSON Henry Clay did not like Andrew Jackson—in fact, he thought he was a rash and boneheaded military thug—and made no secret of the fact: “I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.”

  JACKSON VS. CLAY When Adams announced shortly after the election that Henry Clay would be his secretary of state, Jackson told a friend: “So you see, the Judas of the West [Clay] has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before?”

  THE DUEL The election of 1824 was so contentious that a duel resulted from it. In April of 1826, the hot-tempered Virginian Senator John Randolph made a speech on the Senate floor accusing Henry Clay of throwing the election to John Quincy Adams—specifically, he called him a blackleg, slang for a cheating gambler. This was too much for Clay, who challenged Randolph to a duel.

  The two met early in the morning at a deserted spot along the Potomac River. They took their positions, backed up by seconds who included Senator Thomas Hart Benton, but a comedy of errors ensued. First, Randolph accidentally discharged his gun and had to be given another. Then both men shot and missed. They reloaded, and Clay fired. His bullet pierced Randolph’s coat without hurting him. Randolph paused a moment, then turned and deliberately fired his pistol straight up into the air.

  “I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay,” he said. The two men shook hands and were thereafter friendly acquaintances. Senator Benton dryly remarked that it was “about the last high-toned duel” he ever saw.

  Fashion-conscious opponents argued that John Quincy Adams dressed too poorly to be president.

  ANDREW JACKSON

  VS.

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

  “To the Polls! To the Polls! The faithful sentinel must not sleep—Let no one stay home—Let every man go to the Polls!”

  —United States Telegraph

  The election of 1828 begins with Andrew Jackson’s anger. Jackson—the six-foot-tall ex-frontiersman hero of New Orleans, the man who as a boy of thirteen in the Revolutionary War received a saber slash across the head for refusing to shine the boots of a British officer, and who then survived smallpox and the deaths of his mother and two brothers, and who grew up to defeat not only the British in 1814 but also the Creeks, Seminoles, and Spanish—well, Jackson was not a guy you wanted to piss off.

  But Jackson was convinced that John Quincy Adams had entered into a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay to win the presidency, and he was determined to make things right. Enthusiastically backed by his Tennessee delegation, which in its eagerness nominated him for president in 1825, Jackson resigned his Senate seat and went after the presidency with renewed fervor.

  This spelled bad news for John Quincy Adams, whose presidency was off to a rocky start. On his inauguration day, Adams had to compete for attention with a traveling circus that had come into town—not an easy thing to do in the early 1800s. Then he and his wife, Louisa, discovered that the Monroes had left the White House in a shambles—the furniture was so battered, the place such a horrible mess, that Louisa actually invited members of the public in to take a look, lest she be blamed.

  Adams began his administration with a number of blunders. In his first State of the Union address, he focused not on foreign affairs or the future of westward expansion, but on establishing a national observatory, a series of astronomical outposts that would be “the lighthouses of the sky.” To his credit, Ad
ams was far ahead of his time (he used the same speech to lobby for a regulated system of weights and measures), but this was akin to a contemporary president giving an hour-long State of the Union address passionately advocating the adoption of the metric system.

  Things quickly went from bad to worse. The whole Adams administration, according to a sympathetic biographer, “was a hapless failure and best forgotten, save for the personal anguish it cost him.” With cries of “Corruption and Bargain” ringing from Jackson allies in the West (who now included Adams’s own vice president, John C. Calhoun), Adams was on the defensive at every turn. No wonder he began to feel that he was surrounded by “conspirators,” that he was being tried by a “secret inquisition.” He was. A spiteful opposition in Congress thwarted him in matters both foreign and domestic.

  With so much conflict and strife, it’s no surprise that the Republican Party split into two factions. The National Republicans supported Adams and his vice-presidential pick, Treasury Secretary Richard Rush. They were the party of the old-line Republicans, the wealthy merchant classes, and the landed aristocracy.

  Opposing them were Andrew Jackson and his running mate, John C. Calhoun; they were backed largely by the western small farmers and the eastern laboring men. At first they called themselves the Friends of Andrew Jackson, then Democratic-Republicans, and finally Democrats. This group would form the core of the future Democratic Party.

  And in 1828, both groups would have to contend with a major change to the electoral process—the widespread use of the popular vote. The election of 1828 saw four times as many people casting their vote for president as in the election of 1824. All but two states (Delaware and South Carolina) would use this form of voting to select their candidates, which meant that presidential campaigns—crazy enough to begin with—were about to get a whole lot crazier.

  THE CANDIDATES

  DEMOCRAT-REPUBLICAN: ANDREW JACKSON The general—now sixty-one years old—was probably at the peak of his power. Driven by a belief that the White House had been stolen from him in 1824, as well as a sincere, life-long desire to wrest power from the privileged and place it in the hands of the people, Jackson envisioned himself as a president for the common man, leading with his beloved wife, Rachel, by his side. Sadly, only one part of this dream would come true.

  NATIONAL-REPUBLICAN: JOHN QUINCY ADAMS It was possible that John Quincy Adams—also sixty-one—was running for president just for the sheer, stubborn pride of it, because the previous years had been no picnic. At one point, he was stalked by the first would-be presidential assassin, a crazed doctor who (in a day when any citizen could and did just walk into the White House to see the president) talked openly about killing Adams. To his credit, Adams met with the lunatic and gave him a stern talking-to. Not surprisingly, many historians now speculate that Adams was clinically depressed going into the 1828 campaign.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  With one party claiming to defend the nation against “howling Democracy” and the other battling “a lordly, purse-proud aristocracy,” is it any wonder things soon became very, very malicious?

  The campaign began in September of 1827, after both candidates were nominated (since each party still operated without national nominating conventions, Jackson and Adams were put forward in a series of special state nominating conventions and mass meetings).

  Jackson had the immediate edge because he had understood the need for party organizations in each state. (“You must avail yourself of the physical force of an organized body of men,” he told supporters.) Soon “Friends of Jackson” in all parts of the country were pushing for Old Hickory, the Hero of New Orleans. These “Hurra Boys” wrote political songs, printed pamphlets, and attacked Adams with a vengeance. “[Adams’s] habits and principles are not congenial with … the notions of a democratic people,” one Jackson supporter wrote. They spread rumors about his mysterious “foreign wife” (Louisa was English). When the president bought a billiard table and set of ivory chessmen for the White House, Jackson supporters accused him of purchasing a “gaming table and gambling furniture.” They called Adams a monarchist and anti-religious because he traveled on the Sabbath. And of course he was smeared by his association and friendship with Secretary of State Henry Clay, who supposedly owed his position to the “corrupt bargain.” (Clay was not a statesman, snarled the New Hampshire Patriot, but “a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire [Adams].”)

  Adams supporters organized themselves and returned fire. Jackson, they said, had aided Aaron Burr when the latter conspired against the union in 1806, invading Florida and nearly starting an international incident. They claimed Jackson had the personality of a dictator. And that he couldn’t spell (he supposedly spelled Europe as “Urope”).

  The Republicans also published an extremely nasty but delightfully titled pamphlet called “Reminiscences; or, an Extract from the Catalogue of General Jackson’s Youthful Indiscretions between the Age of Twenty-three and Sixty.” It enumerated all of Jackson’s purported fights, duels, brawls, and shoot-outs. It described him as an adulterer, a gambler, a cockfighter, a slave trader, a drunkard, a thief, a liar, and the husband of a really fat wife.

  There was very little serious examination of the issues, such as rural America’s desperate need of public works projects or tariff protection for New England manufacturers. Jackson was known for being evasive about his opinions—a fact that he tried to turn into a virtue: “My real friends want no information from me on the subject of internal improvement and manufactories.… Was I now to come forward and reiterate my public opinions on these subjects, I would be charged with electioneering for selfish purposes.”

  Adams’s positions were well-known—he was pro-tariff and pro-public works—but his voice was lost in the din of battle. No wonder the guy was depressed.

  THE WINNER: ANDREW JACKSON

  Balloting took place on different days in different states, from September through November of 1828. Results indicated a clear victory for Jackson, with 642,553 votes compared to 500,897 for Adams. The campaign had been so bitter that neither candidate made the customary post-election courtesy calls on the other (and John Quincy Adams became the second American president, after his father, not to attend his successor’s inauguration).

  Jackson took the oath of office in March; the streets of Washington were filled with massive crowds of common people who had come from hundreds of miles away to view this historic day. Jackson supporters famously surged into the White House, wiped their feet on delicate rugs, broke antique chairs, and ate and drank everything in sight. Thousands of dollars worth of glass and china were broken, fights ensued, and women feared for their virtue. In the end, the exhausted Jackson slipped out the back door to a local inn to get some sleep.

  JOHN Q. ADAMS, PIMP When people really want to get dirty, they hit below the belt. In this case, Jackson supporters claimed with utter seriousness that the prudish Adams, when serving as minister to the Russian court of Czar Alexander I, had offered his wife’s maid to the czar as a concubine. That there was a kernel of innocent truth here—Adams had introduced the young woman to the czar—made the lie easier to swallow.

  ANDREW JACKSON, BIGAMIST The Republicans returned fire with a vengeance—targeting not only Jackson but also his wife, Rachel. She had been previously married to the abusive and pathologically jealous Lewis Robards, who had finally left her in 1790 to get a divorce. Jackson had married Rachel in 1791, under the impression that the divorce was final—only it wasn’t, because Robards had delayed getting the divorce decree. This clerical oversight went undiscovered for nearly two years, and once it surfaced, Jackson and Rachel were forced to remarry, just to make everything legal.

  Because of this history, Rachel—whom Jackson loved deeply—fell victim to the ugliest slanders imaginable. Republicans said that she was a “whore” and a “dirty, black wench” given to “open and notorious lewdness.” “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the
highest office of this free and Christian land?” asked the Cincinnati Gazette.

  Adams supporters hoped that Jackson might lose his cool and challenge someone to a duel—perhaps even kill one of his tormentors. But what happened was that Rachel, who was overweight and had some health problems, took these attacks quite literally to heart. In December 1828, after Jackson had won the election, she died of a heart attack. Jackson grieved profoundly and was as wrathful as an Old Testament prophet. At her funeral, he intoned: “In the presence of this dear saint I can and do forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy.”

  MOST VICIOUS BROADSIDE Perhaps the nastiest political attack on Jackson was the infamous Coffin Handbill, a widely circulated broadside displaying six coffins under the headline: “Some account of some of the Bloody Deeds of General Jackson.” It went on to tell the story of the six militiamen whose order of execution Jackson had approved during the War of 1812. The men were the leaders of a mutiny of 200 militiamen who thought their terms of service were up. The army disagreed. The men were court-martialed; nearly all were merely fined, but the six ringleaders were sentenced to death. Jackson signed the execution papers, and at the time, few objected. During the campaign, however, the Coffin Handbill painted Jackson out to be bloodthirsty and merciless: “Sure he will spare! Sure JACKSON yet / Will all reprieve but one—/O hark! Those shrieks! That cry of death! / The deadly deed is done!”