by H. W. Brands
By the middle of December the shape of the electoral vote was finally coming clear. Jackson led, with Adams second. Uncertainty still surrounded the third-place finisher. This was no small matter, in that the Constitution decreed that in the event of failure of any candidate to receive a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives would choose the president from the top three finishers. Everyone assumed that if Clay made it to the House, his long tenure and close alliances there could boost him past Adams and Jackson. But if Crawford nosed out Clay, Jackson would have the edge.
Jackson maintained his composure amid the confusion. “To say I have nothing of concern about the office would be doing injustice to the kind feelings of those who have sustained me, and would wear the appearance of affectation,” he wrote Samuel Swartout, a friend and strong supporter. Yet Jackson was willing to accept any verdict that reflected the honest wishes of the people. “Who shall rule is of less importance than how he may claim to rule. . . . I would rather remain a plain cultivator of the soil, as I am, than to occupy that which is truly the first office in the world, if the voice of the nation was against it.”
This was the politic thing for Jackson to say. It was also easy. By now he wanted to be president; in the contest his combative energies had become engaged. And the popular vote confirmed that he was the choice of the people. For him to lose would be for the people’s will to be ignored, for democracy to be denied.
He had every reason to hope otherwise. The politicians wouldn’t dare overturn the people’s decision. He grew still more confident when the final electoral tally gave him 99 votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. The lion of the House would not be among those considered by the House for president. In the western states that Clay had carried, most voters seemed to rank Jackson second. It was natural to assume that their House delegations would swing to the Jackson column. “The Lord’s will be done,” Jackson said as the year ended, at a moment when the Lord appeared to agree with the American people that Andrew Jackson should be the next president of the United States.
On the first day of the new year, John Quincy Adams attended a dinner hosted by members of both houses of Congress, in honor of Lafayette. James Monroe was there, with several other officials of the executive branch and a number of military officers. A cold rain had been falling all day, and with evening it turned to snow. Adams and his wife wished to get home before the roads became dangerously slick, but they had to stay for the toasts. “The President’s Administration was toasted, to which he answered by a brief address of thanks,” Adams recorded in his diary. “General La Fayette answered also very briefly the toast to himself. Mr. Clay made a speech about Bolivar and the cause of South America, and seemed very desirous of eliciting speeches from me and Mr. Calhoun.” Adams resisted, with one eye on the weather and one foot toward the door. But before he could make his escape, Clay approached him. “He told me that he should be glad to have with me soon some confidential conversation upon public affairs.” Clay said nothing more about the subject of the conversation, but Adams was intrigued. “I said I should be happy to have it whenever it might suit his convenience.” And when he got home that night, as he warmed himself by his fire, he wrote, “At the beginning of this year there is in my prospects and anticipations a solemnity and moment never before experienced.”
Clay had commenced the new year in a mood as foul as the weather. Not until the vote from Louisiana had been recorded did he learn that he wasn’t among the trio to be considered by the House. And he had lost in the Louisiana legislature by bad, dumb luck. “Two of my friends in the Legislature were overset in a gig the day before and thereby prevented from attending; two others who were expected did not arrive,” he wrote an associate. That had made all the difference. “Accident alone prevented my return to the House of Representatives and, as is generally now believed, my election.”
But if he couldn’t be president, he might yet determine who would be. “You are a looker-on,” he told a friend, “whilst I am compelled to be an actor in the public concerns here. And an actor in such a scene! An alternative made up of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams!” Clay saw little to choose between the two. Clay’s friend had suggested that the speaker might find a place in a new administration. Clay rejected the very thought. “I would not cross Pennsylvania Avenue to be in any office under any Administration which lies before us.”
Yet soon he was crossing more than Pennsylvania Avenue. “Mr. Clay came at six, and spent the evening with me in a long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future,” Adams recorded in his diary on January 9. “He said that the time was drawing near when the choice must be made in the House of Representatives of a President from the three candidates presented by the electoral college; that he had been much urged and solicited with regard to the part in that transaction that he should take, and had not been five minutes landed at his lodgings before he had been applied to by a friend of Mr. Crawford’s, in a manner so gross that it had disgusted him.” Nor were Crawford’s partisans the only ones seeking his favor. “Some of my friends also, disclaiming indeed to have any authority from me, had repeatedly applied to him, directly or indirectly, urging considerations personal to himself as motives to his cause.” Clay had rebuffed the approaches, wishing to let public passions cool. Unfortunately, they had not, and currently remained as hot as ever. But the hour had come to address Adams directly. “He wished me, 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. In the question to come before the House between General Jackson, Mr. Crawford, and myself, he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.”
There is no reason to doubt that Clay told Adams just what Adams recorded. Yet only the day before, Clay had written to Francis Blair, a Kentucky editor (who, ironically, would become one of Jackson’s closest advisers), in a rather different tone. “I consider whatever choice we may make will be only a choice of evils,” Clay told Blair. “To both those gentlemen there are strong personal objections.” Clay’s objections to Adams, however, were less than those to Jackson. “The principal difference between them is that in the election of Mr. Adams we shall not by the example inflict any wound upon the character of our institutions; but I should much fear hereafter, if not during the present generation, that the election of the General would give to the military spirit a stimulus and a confidence that might lead to the most pernicious results. I shall therefore with great regret, on account of the dilemma in which the people have placed us, support Mr. Adams.”
In his meeting the next day with Adams, Clay apparently elided his regret and his belief that the secretary of state was simply the lesser of evils. And after that meeting he changed his story about not wanting an office in the new administration. “I can tell you nothing of the formation of the new Cabinet,” he informed a friend, before adding, “I believe that, if I choose to go into it, I can enter in any situation that I may please.” Clay didn’t want his friend to get the wrong idea. “This opinion is formed from circumstances, not from assurances to which I would not listen, but which I should instantly check if attempted to be made.”
Whether or not Clay’s friend got the wrong idea, others did. Or perhaps they got the right idea. Rumors swept through the halls of the Capitol and along the streets of Washington; by the end of the month Clay’s preference for Adams was public knowledge. In a letter to Blair, Clay explained his thinking. “Mr. Adams, you know well, I should never have selected if at liberty to draw from the whole mass of citizens for our President. But there is no danger in his elevation now or in time to come. Not so of his competitor, of whom I cannot believe that killing 2500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult and complicated duties of the Chief Magistrate.” To another associate, Clay articulated more graphically what he saw as the danger from Jackson. “As a friend of liberty, and to the permanence of our institutions
, I cannot consent, in the early stage of their existence, by contributing to the election of a military chieftain, to give the strongest guaranty that this republic will march in the fatal road which has conducted every other republic to ruin.”
In the letter to Blair, Clay followed his explanation of preference for Adams by saying, “I perceive that I am unconsciously writing a sort of defence, which you may possibly think implies guilt.” Clay had reason to feel defensive, for Jackson’s supporters were already alleging a deal between Clay and Adams, with Adams to receive the presidency and Clay a high cabinet office, probably the secretaryship of state. Clay felt obliged to respond. After a Philadelphia paper carried a letter from an unnamed “member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania” likening Clay to Aaron Burr and describing the alleged Clay-Adams bargain as “one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the Republican ranks,” Clay called the author out. “I pronounce the member, whoever he may be, a base and infamous calumniator, a dastard and a liar; and if he ever dare unveil himself and avow his name I will hold him responsible . . . to all the laws which govern and regulate the conduct of men of honor.”
The complaints of the Jacksonians failed to prevent Adams and Clay from getting what they wanted. The House of Representatives, voting by state delegations, selected Adams to be president over Jackson and Calhoun, by a margin of thirteen to seven to four. “May the blessing of God rest upon the event of this day!” Adams inscribed in his diary.
Jackson accepted the decision with outward calm. He attended a reception hosted by President Monroe for the president-elect. “It was crowded to overflowing,” Adams wrote. “General Jackson was there, and we shook hands. He was altogether placid and courteous.” John Eaton observed the same equanimity in Jackson. “The old man goes quietly on, undisturbed and unmoved by the agitation around. Even enemies speak highly of his course.”
Appearance, in this case, deceived. Privately Jackson was livid. Days after Adams’s victory in the House, the president-elect openly offered the State Department to Clay, who duly accepted. Jackson spat his disgust. “The Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver,” he said. “His end will be the same.”
And so began the longest, bitterest, ugliest campaign in American political history. Adams wasn’t even inaugurated before Jackson’s hometown paper, the Nashville Gazette, declared him a candidate for president in 1828. The paper hadn’t consulted Jackson but relied on the general’s assertion that a man called by the people to democratic office couldn’t refuse. Jackson himself fueled the enthusiasm by taking vigorous and sarcastic exception to Clay’s charge that he was a dangerous “military chieftain.” “It is for an ingenuity stronger than mine to conceive what idea was intended to be conveyed by that term,” Jackson said.
It is very true that early in life, even in the days of boyhood, I contributed my mite to shake off the yoke of tyranny, and to build up the fabrick of free government; and when lately our country was involved in war, having the commission of Major General of militia in Tennessee, I made an appeal to the patriotism of the western citizens, when 3000 of them went with me to the field, to support her Eagles. If this can constitute me a “military chieftain,” I am one.
Aided by the patriotism of the western people, and an indulgent providence, it was my good fortune to protect our frontier border from savages, and successfully to defend an important and vulnerable point of our Union. Our lives were risked, privations endured, sacrifices made, if Mr. Clay pleases, martial law declared, not with any view of personal aggrandisement, but for the preservation of all and everything that was valuable, the honor, safety, and glory of our country. Does this constitute a “military chieftain”? And are all our brave men in war, who go forth to defend their rights, and the rights of their country, to be termed “military chieftains,” and therefore denounced?
Jackson couldn’t resist noting that Clay had never risked life, limb, or treasure for his country. And now he seemed to be saying that those who had done so should be disqualified from political office. Such demagogues were the ones to be feared, not honest soldiers.
I became a soldier for the good of my country. Difficulties met me at every step. I thank God it was my good fortune to surmount them. The war over and peace restored, I sought to retire again to my farm and to private life, where but for the call made by my country to the Senate I should have contentedly remained. . . . If this makes me so, I am a “military chieftain.”
Jackson returned to his farm, although not exactly to private life. He was one of the most famous men in America, and certainly the most popular, and his supporters were determined to make him president. John Eaton and some allies purchased a recently Crawfordist newspaper in Washington and transformed it into an organ of Jacksonism. Jacksonians in other cities followed suit, aiming to get out the good word on Jackson and the bad word on Adams and Clay. Eaton was joined in Congress by Sam Houston, who had emulated his surrogate father by becoming major general of the Tennessee militia and then fighting a duel (but only badly wounding his foe). In Washington, Houston and Eaton became Jackson’s ardent advocates. They wrote letters to editors, and editorials, and kept Jackson apprised of the mood of Congress. “I have not in my life seen a cause rising so fast as that of the people is,” Houston told Jackson, “nor one sinking faster than the cause of a wicked and corrupt coalition! . . . You lose no friends, but gain daily. It will be so until the great day of deliverance to our country arrives.”
Jackson could have taken the temperature of Congress himself had he not resigned his Senate seat. He dreaded the thought of another season of windy rhetoric and barren posturing, but at first he couldn’t figure out how to avoid it. His stated philosophy of neither seeking nor shunning office seemed to rule out resignation. But deliverance came in the form of an apparent conflict of interest. Congressional Jacksonians angered by the outcome of the 1824 election proposed a constitutional amendment forbidding the appointment of members of Congress to posts in the executive branch during the term of their election and for two years thereafter. If adopted, the amendment would have prevented appointments like that of Clay by Adams. The amendment went nowhere, but it gave Jackson an—apparently unintended—excuse to leave the Senate. For him to vote on a measure so clearly inspired by his defeat in the House would be improper, he told the Tennessee legislature. Therefore “I must entreat to be excused from any further service in the Senate.”
If Jackson was relieved upon ending his senatorial career, Rachel was ecstatic. She had been disappointed for her husband at the result of the election but pleased for herself. The thought of life in the White House made her shudder. Washington’s excitements were nothing next to what she called “the variety of dear little interests” of home. The journey west from Washington had been slow, but she didn’t begrudge the delay, as each mile carried her closer to her heart’s content. “Our time was delightfully occupied on the road,” she wrote a friend. “From Baltimore to our farm we were honored by the most friendly and hospitable attentions.”
The more Rachel pondered the matter, the more she concluded that she now enjoyed the best of all worlds. She had the honor of being married to the man the American people most wanted to lead them, yet she didn’t bear the burden of being a president’s wife. “To me,” she told her friend, “the Presidential charms by the side of a happy retirement from public life are as the tale of the candle and the substantial fire, the first of which it is said is soon blown out by the wind but the latter is only increased by it.”
Rachel’s joy at returning home doubtless distracted her from the improvements in the route she and her husband traveled to get there. The slowness of their journey owed far more to the popular demands on her husband than to the condition of the road itself, which had changed dramatically during the three decades since Jackson had first ridden east. Private funds had built a pike from Baltimore to Cumberland, Maryland; from there the federal governme
nt picked up construction of what was called the National Road. By 1818 the road had reached the Ohio River at Wheeling, in the panhandle of western Virginia. Travel on the road was as convenient and pleasant as land travel could be in those days. Its crushed-stone surface shed rain, banishing the mud that had bogged wagons in rainy weather and most of the dust that had choked travelers in dry. Arched stone bridges eliminated dependence on ferrymen and susceptibility to the flooding of low-water crossings. Taverns lined the route, averaging more than one per mile in stretches. These establishments varied in quality, from stagecoach inns offering meals and beds to the well-heeled travelers aboard the scheduled coaches to wagon stands providing minimal services for those transporting themselves.
At Wheeling travelers to Nashville could board steamboats, which carried them down the Ohio and up the Cumberland. Steamboat passage was more expensive than travel by stage, but it was far more comfortable. First-class travelers—like the Jacksons—had private rooms, and they could stroll about the decks during the day. The earliest steamboats had a disturbing habit of blowing up, but by the mid-1820s explosions were infrequent enough to occasion surprise when they did occur. More common, though less spectacular, were groundings on sandbars, collisions with other craft, and minor fires from smokestack sparks.
Yet the really exciting development in water travel in the 1820s relied not on steam power but on mules. In 1825, after eight years of construction, the Erie Canal was completed. Governor De Witt Clinton, the driving force behind the construction, signaled the importance of the event by pouring two kegs of Lake Erie water into the harbor at New York City. The water link between the Atlantic and the Lakes transformed the economies of both the Northeast and the Northwest—in fact, made them part of a single economy for the first time. Transport costs from Ohio to New York fell by as much as 90 percent; now farm products from the interior, carried east on the mule-drawn canal barges, could compete with those grown on the seaboard.