by James Traub
The next morning, Weed locked himself in the empty office of a local pro-Adams paper, the Daily Advertiser, and printed up the joint ballot. The following day, the list was deposited in the ballot box instead of the expected all-Adams ticket, so that when Lieutenant Governor Erastus Root reached in, he pulled out the document and spluttered in amazement, “Split ticket!”
“Treason by God!,” cried a Crawfordite. Pandemonium reigned. Senators tried to adjourn the meeting. In any vote, they knew, the more numerous assembly members would outvote them. Colonel James Tallmadge, an Adams man, rose and “in a stentorian voice” demanded in the name of the American people that a vote go forward. The Adams slate won 78 of the 157 votes. Since two electors submitted blank ballots, and one voted for Jackson, who wasn’t competing in the state, Adams had won a bare majority of the 154 valid votes cast. But Root, a Van Buren ally, insisted on treating the three as having voted against Adams and refused to certify the choice.
Now pandemonium broke out once again. All afternoon men shouted, gestured, and milled about on the floor. Root finally stalked out of the chamber, taking much of the senate with him. But the Adams-Clay combination could no longer be put off. Both houses reconvened the following day, and after a series of votes, Adams emerged with twenty-five of New York’s electors, Clay with seven, and Crawford with four. Adams had bested Crawford—or rather, Thurlow Weed had bested Martin van Buren. Adams was receiving news of the proceedings daily from three or four lieutenants; none of them so much as mentioned Weed’s backstairs dealings. Adams did not have to know the truth of what had been done in his name.
State results had already begun arriving in Washington. Andrew Jackson proved to be the only candidate with true national appeal. He won all of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, as the Harrisburg convention had long since indicated, as well as those of New Jersey. And he surged as Clay faded in the West and Crawford in the South. Crawford won only in Georgia, Virginia, and Delaware. Clay carried only the three western states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio. And Adams reaped the consequences of his stubborn refusal to mount a campaign. Only in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire had a sizeable network of allies gone to work for him; elsewhere his prospects were largely left up to chance. And so Adams had won nowhere outside New England, though he had picked up votes throughout the country.
The last state to report in was Louisiana. Clay was counting on winning some or all of the state’s votes. But in another split ticket, Jackson won three votes, and Adams two. Meanwhile, four of the apparent Clay voters in New York had switched back to Crawford. “You promised us seven votes!,” the Kentuckian’s supporters shouted at New York’s conniving boy wonder, Thurlow Weed. But that was conditioned on your winning Louisiana, Weed rejoined. Perhaps it was, and perhaps it wasn’t. “By a strict and literal construction of the understanding,” Weed later wrote, he had played fair—though “the subject gave me much annoyance and solicitude.”
In those states where citizens voted for president, Jackson had taken 153,544; Adams 108,740; Clay 47,136; Crawford 46,618. But it was the electoral votes that counted, and here the final tally read: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, Clay 37. The four defected New York votes had cost Clay his chance at the presidency. Clay was a supremely political animal, but in a letter to his friend Francis Brooke he admitted that he couldn’t make head or tails of the New York vote. Now only Jackson, Adams, and Crawford, a broken man, survived. The vote in the House was scheduled for February 9.
Adams could have taken the position that the nation had spoken, that voters had chosen Jackson, that his candidacy had remained alive only by virtue of a constitutional technicality. That is, he could have withdrawn. Jackson’s friends put it out that this would be the correct thing for Adams to do. There is no sign that this idea crossed his mind. Adams would not have acknowledged that anything in the Constitution could be deemed a technicality. And in any case, he had admitted to himself that not even the frosty Caucasus could cool off the fire of his ambition. Already he had allowed himself to offer the kind of veiled reassurances that once would have struck him as low political bargaining; now he would shred the fine tissue of his conscience.
The Constitution stipulated the formula whereby the House would determine the president: each state had one vote, to be determined by a vote taken among the congressmen from that state. Balloting would continue until one man won thirteen or more of the twenty-four states. What this meant was that little Rhode Island mattered as much as giant New York. Every congressman would have a hand in determining the next president.
On December 9, a full week before the final results were in, Adams began fielding a flood of visitors from the Congress, both at home and in the office. And he did something he had not done before: he went around to the rooming houses where almost all members of Congress stayed during the session. That is, he paid court. And he recorded the substance of his conversations in his diary. He spoke to friends of DeWitt Clinton, who intimated that he might wish to join an Adams administration; Adams repeated his feelings of high esteem for the former governor. He spoke to William Plumer Jr. about Daniel Webster, the great Federalist. Webster had earlier justified his preference for Clay on the grounds that Adams would never appoint a Federalist—though he, Webster, had no personal wish for a post. In fact, Plumer disclosed, Webster was “panting for London,” which Adams said he might well be able to gratify, if not just yet. Adams had a long talk with Robert P. Letcher, a Kentucky congressman who was close to Clay and shared lodgings with him. Then Clay himself joined the conversation.
Once the results from Louisiana arrived, Clay was thrust into the role of kingmaker. On December 15, Edward Wyer, a former diplomat whom Adams used on sensitive missions and who was obviously in his confidence, came by to say that “he had it from good authority that Mr. Clay was much disposed to support me, if at the same time he could be useful to himself.” Wyer returned the next day and repeated his story, refusing to disclose his source. On the seventeenth, Representative Letcher paid another call. Letcher spent a good deal of time beating around the bush, pretending to be interested in the census of 1820, before homing in on local politics. He explained that Kentuckians preferred Jackson to Adams, as Adams knew perfectly well. A faction of them were at odds with Clay himself; they were scarcely bound to one another by ties of loyalty. Clay wished to “stand with his friends”; his friends wished to stand with him. Then he got to the point: What were Adams’ sentiments toward Clay? Letcher was obviously Wyer’s source: he had reached out, friend to friend.
Adams said that he “harbored no hostility towards Clay,” even though he believed Clay to have goaded Jonathan Russell to action. Letcher, who must have been prepared for this sally, said that Clay’s letter claiming that Adams had misstated the facts from the negotiations at Ghent “was written in a moment of excitement.” Clay “had spoken respectfully” of Adams, and so forth. Adams understood that Letcher was telling him that if he could reassure Clay’s friends that their man would have “a prominent share in the administration,” they would be prepared to disregard the instructions they received from Kentucky and vote for Adams. Letcher “made no definite propositions,” and Adams himself responded “in general terms.” Their work was begun but not concluded.
James Barbour, a senator and former governor from Virginia, came by. Barbour had no doubt that electors in his state would prefer Adams to Jackson once it became clear that Crawford had no chance. He sounded Adams out on the contentious issues of internal improvements and the tariff. Adams disposed of the first with no difficulty. He was for it, and that was that. On the tariff, he tried to walk a very fine line. His policy, he explained, with delicate if uncharacteristic spin, was conciliation rather than collision. If the current tariff needed to be changed at all, it was by reduction—a view very different from that of Clay, who with great effort had pushed increased duties through Congress during the previous session. Adams argued that revenue was sufficient, and manufacturers had quit
e enough protection; if commercial and agricultural interests favored a relaxation of duties, then Adams was prepared to do just that. Barbour could scarcely have expected to bring his colleagues more positive tidings.
Martin Van Buren wrote asking for a consulship in South America for a Mr. Winne. Adams paid a visit and said that if Mr. Winne could choose a port where he wished to reside, he would recommend him to the president. He was later able to inform Van Buren that Winne would in fact be nominated. Letcher kept coming by with hints and advice. Adams knew that he was straying very far indeed from the Macbeth Policy. “Incendo super ignes,” he wrote to himself—“I tread on coals.”
Clay, who had a taste for irony that his rivals conspicuously lacked, was enjoying his new role as unmarried beauty. He wrote a letter to a confidante describing how friends of each of the three remaining aspirants had beaten a path to his doorstep to proclaim that he, Henry Clay, had always been the candidate’s second choice for the presidency and then implore him to throw his support to their man. The truth was, Clay went on, that Crawford was too sick for the rigors of the job, and as between “the two evils” remaining, Jackson would “give the military spirit a stimulus and confidence which could lead to the most pernicious results,” whereas Adams would leave America’s institutions as he had found them.
Jackson did pay a visit to Clay’s rooming house, as Adams did, and Clay, who had been out, returned the favor—but he never dispatched an emissary to Jackson as he had to Adams. So much venom had passed between Clay and Jackson that even the all-forgetting waters of Lethe in which politicians routinely bathe could not put things right between them. And strictly as a matter of calculation, a President Adams might only last one term, while a President Jackson might prove impossible to dislodge. Clay would support Adams, but not without exacting a price.
At a New Year’s Day dinner for Lafayette at the White House, Clay sidled up to Adams and whispered that he would like to have a “free & confidential visit” with him. On Sunday morning, January 9, Clay sent a note asking if he could pay the visit at six that evening. Adams consented. The text that morning at church came from Ecclesiastes: “I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me.” Adams might well have taken that rueful lesson to heart. Clay came by as appointed. In the course of “a long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future,” Clay spoke of the advances he had spurned over the previous weeks, and explained, with his usual wry turn, that he had waited to “give a decent time for his own funeral solemnities as a candidate.” And, he added with splendid disingenuousness, he had needed to reassure his friends that they should vote according to their own consciences. But the time had come for him to choose. “He wished me,” Adams recorded, “as far as I might think proper, to satisfy him with regard to some principles of great public importance, but without any personal considerations for himself.” That, apparently, had been left to Letcher. As for the contest in the House, “he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.”
What did Adams mean by “prospective of the future”? What were those “principles of great public importance”? Did the two men discuss private matters as well? We don’t know, because Adams chose to draw a veil over the particulars—or perhaps he never found the time to delineate them. (He left a blank space at the end of the passage, as if he had planned to write more.) Clay later wrote in a letter to an ally that, though Adams had made no promises, he concluded from the interview that he could have whatever job he wanted. That may well have been true.
Adams might have installed Clay in his cabinet under any circumstances. He admired Clay’s judgment, if not his personal morals; he was one of the ablest men in the nation. But Adams understood that reassuring Clay and his followers would put Kentucky in his column, and probably Ohio and Missouri as well. Adams had not received a single popular vote in Kentucky—not one. Jackson was immensely popular there, and the state plainly would have gone for him had Clay not been a favorite son. Adams would never have to know how Clay would exert his influence, but he would know that the consequence was that the will of the people would be overborne. That was a grave violation of his own republican principles. Adams would have said that no price was worth paying for the sacrifice of principle, but there is no sign that he believed at the time that he had done any such thing. He was thinking about the goal, not the means. And the ambitious man must be prepared to tread on burning coals.
Four days after Adams’ meeting with Clay, the Kentucky state legislature passed a resolution overwhelmingly pledging support for Jackson. Of course, the actual vote belonged to the state’s congressional caucus, whose members were fully aware of the understanding between Adams and Clay. Senator R. M. Johnson of Kentucky confided to Adams that the delegation would vote for him, 7 to 5. Johnson was off by 1: on January 24, the delegation announced for Adams, 8–4. Clay had delivered his state, as Van Buren once planned to deliver his for Crawford. Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri, a confirmed Jacksonite, later wrote in his memoirs that while he had not been offended at the news of Adams’ pact with Clay, since Clay had told him in mid-December that he would support the secretary of state, the gross violation of the will of the people of Kentucky was a crime.
But Kentucky was hardly going to put Adams over the top. Adams had spent a lifetime training himself to expect the worst, and he was still all but certain that he would lose. He heard that Jackson and Crawford had reconciled. The South and the West would join against him. The day after Kentucky swung into his column, Adams wrote in his journal that while the expectation he would win had gained “almost universal” currency, “I have little doubt that will be decisive the other way.” In fact, Jackson and his allies had been courting the Crawford forces. Mrs. Jackson had agreed to accept a visit from Mrs. Crawford, which observers considered highly significant. If Jackson held on to his states and took Crawford’s, it was all over. Adams wasn’t even sure that he would keep New York.
Word of the agreement between Adams and Clay had leaked out even before the vote of Kentucky’s congressional caucus confirmed that something was afoot between the two men; the Jackson forces did their best to make hay from the stealthy and most un-Adams-like transaction. In Illinois, the ballot would be cast by the sole representative, Daniel P. Cook, who was retiring. Two Jackson men, Samuel Ingham of Philadelphia and George McDuffie of South Carolina, cornered Cook in a hotel room. Adams and Clay had reached a devil’s bargain, they said. Cook had a chance to defeat their designs: other western states would not migrate to Adams if Cook held fast. When Cook still resisted, they threatened that he would be ruined when the West rose as one against an Adams administration. Cook, a Clay man who had shifted to Adams, bravely rejoined that his own sense of duty would compel him to stand against that vast movement should it arise.
By now, news of the “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay had gone public. It was an astonishing last-minute bonus for Jackson, for the story reinforced the central theme of his campaign. On January 28, the Columbian Observer of Philadelphia printed an anonymous letter claiming that Adams had offered to make Clay secretary of state in exchange for his influence—which was more or less true—and that Clay’s friends had then made the same offer to friends of Jackson, who had refused to “descend to such mean barter and sale”—which was not true. “It was,” the author alleged, “one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the Republican ranks.” The plain implication was that John Quincy Adams was scarcely the man the public thought it knew. On February 4, the National Intelligencer reprinted the letter, now identified as coming from an unnamed Pennsylvania congressman. “It is now ascertained for a certainty,” the editors wrote, that the alleged deal had been made.
On January 29, the day after the story broke, Henry Clay paid Adams another visit. Clay was utterly unbowed. That day he had written to a friend, “The knaves cannot comprehend how a man can be honest.” The election was eleven days away; the outcome, despite Clay’s mach
inations, was impossible to predict. Now certain of his own position, Clay put aside his sidelong, insinuating manner. “He spoke to me with the utmost freedom of men and things,” Adams wrote, “intimated doubts and prepossessions concerning individual friends of mine, to all which I listened with due consideration.” Adams may have understood for the first time what an invaluable ally he had in Clay, who shared many of his views but was also a far more shrewd judge of men than he was.
Adams held long conversations with President Monroe, who was preparing to nominate candidates for vacant ministerial posts. Adams begged him to make the decisions himself and do so before the election; should Adams win, he could not be seen as handing out plums in exchange for support, even through the instrument of the current president. He even memorialized the conversation in a letter to the president, presumably to be furnished later as evidence of his own innocence—another sign that Adams felt he had done nothing untoward with Clay. Monroe, however, was not prepared to make the nominations and so didn’t.
Daniel Webster paid a visit on February 3. He had been skeptical of Adams, the Federalist turncoat, though Adams’ effort at persuasion seem to have helped; he had written to a friend, “I think a little better of the kindness of his feelings toward us, than I have done.” As recently as mid-January he had still been wondering what to do with his vote should Adams fail to carry a majority on the first ballot, but by now he felt more confident that Adams had thirteen states in his column. That morning, however, he had received a letter from a Maryland Federalist, Henry R. Warfield, asking if it were true that Adams would ban their ilk from office. Warfield confessed that he was the deciding vote in Maryland, which had gone for Jackson but might switch to Adams. And Maryland could be the deciding vote in the Union. What should he do? Webster now read to Adams a letter he intended to send reassuring Warfield on this score. Adams thanked him, though he felt compelled to add that Jackson or Crawford would doubtless pursue the same policy. Webster then sent the note to Warfield, adding in a postscript that he had read the letter to Adams and gotten his approval.