1824 Presidential Election
The Presidential Election of 1824 was a significant event in American history marked by a contentious and controversial outcome. It was the first election in which the popular vote did not directly determine the winner, leading to a "corrupt bargain" between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. This election ultimately contributed to the formation of the Democratic Party and the beginning of the modern two-party system in the United States.
6 Key excerpts on "1824 Presidential Election"
- Gregory Feldmeth, Christine Custred(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...But this year the system failed, and the caucuses were bypassed. Another change came in the selection of the Electoral College members, who were now being almost universally elected by the people, rather than by the state legislatures as in the early days. The Candidates Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia was the pick of the Congressional caucus. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams held the job, which traditionally had been the stepping-stone to the executive office. Speaker of the House Henry Clay presented the only coherent program to the voters, the “American System,” which provided a high tariff on imports to finance an extensive internal improvement package. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee presented himself as a war hero from the 1812 conflict. All four candidates claimed to be Democrat-Republicans. The Election Jackson won 43 percent of the popular vote, but the four-way split meant that he received only 38 percent of the electoral votes. Under the provisions of the 12th Amendment, the House of Representatives voted on the top three candidates. This left Henry Clay out of the running, and he threw his support to Adams. The votes had no sooner been counted when the new president, Adams, appointed Henry Clay his Secretary of State. Andrew Jackson and his supporters immediately cried “foul!” and accused Clay of making a deal for his vote. The rallying cry of “corrupt bargain” became the impetus for their immediate initiation of the campaign for the 1828 election. The Adams Administration The new president pushed for an active federal government in areas like internal improvements and Native American affairs. These policies proved unpopular in an age of increasing sectional jealousies and conflicts over states’ rights. Like his father, John, John Quincy Adams was an ineffective president. Adams was frustrated at every turn by his Jacksonian opposition, and his unwillingness, or inability, to compromise further antagonized his political enemies...
eBook - ePubThe Ohio Politics Almanac
Third Edition, Revised and Updated
- Michael Curtin, Joe Hallett(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...The founders, however, had not envisioned the rise of political parties and the power the parties would wield in choosing electors. By 1824, candidate committees in Ohio and other states were nominating slates of electors. That year, Ohio was entitled to 16 electoral votes. The 1820 census and the resulting reapportionment doubled Ohio’s electoral clout, stirring interest—among the public and the candidates—in the state’s role in the 1824 presidential contest. In the presidential balloting on October 29, 1824, Clay narrowly defeated Jackson in the popular vote in Ohio, capturing the state’s 16 electoral votes; nationally, though, Jackson won more popular and electoral votes. Jackson had not received a majority of the nation’s electoral votes, however, so the election was decided by the House of Representatives. With Clay supporting John Quincy Adams, the House named Adams president. Between the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections, Ohio saw an expansion of its network of ward, township, county, and district political meetings and conventions. At the meetings, candidates for state and local offices were recommended, delegates to state conventions chosen, and committees to prepare for the next presidential election established. In 1827, conventions were held in dozens of counties in preparation for a Jackson statewide convention on January 8 and 9, 1828, in Columbus. The convention, with 160 delegates from across the state, selected a slate of 16 Jackson presidential electors and recommended John W. Campbell for governor. Meetings also were held across Ohio that year for Adams, whose faction of the Democratic-Republican Party had taken the name National Republican Party. Jackson’s Ohio supporters led the way in grassroots organization, and Jackson narrowly carried Ohio in the fall, when he was elected president. With Jackson in the White House, the Democratic-Republican Party dropped the word Republican from its name and became simply the Democratic Party...
eBook - ePub- Richard K. Scher(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Examples are legion. In 1828 the incumbent John Quincy Adams exchanged vitriolic unpleasantries with the man whom he had defeated 4 years earlier, the irascible military hero from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson. Jackson, the Quincy Adams forces declared, was ignorant, reckless, inexperienced, a blasphemer, bastard, and adulterer (allegedly because he had married before his new wife was divorced) and, worst of all, a murderer: not because he had massacred untold numbers of Seminoles, but because he had murdered some of his own men in cold blood. Some of Quincy Adams’s handbills, circulated with drawings of what were supposedly their coffins, still survive. But, try as the Quincy Adams campaign did to make Jackson lose his temper publicly, they failed. Instead, the Jacksonians hit back hard. Quincy Adams, they claimed, was a monarchist, a “squanderer of the taxpayers’ dollars on silken fripperies, a Sabbath breaker [for riding on Sunday] and pimp”; this latter because allegedly Quincy Adams had procured American girls for Czar Alexander I while serving as minister to the Russian Court. Jackson of course won, because he rode a tide of increasing democratic populism cresting across the nation at that time. But he was aided by a huge campaign treasury; allegedly the campaign of 1828 was the first million-dollar one in American history and the first in which money— heavily favoring Jackson—made the difference in the outcome. The presidential campaign of 1840 was the direct precursor of the one in 1968; both featured a wholly “invented,” or “remade,” candidate; put differently, both campaigns were based on neatly constructed fables: William Henry Harrison in the case of the former, and Richard Milhous Nixon in the latter. Both were made out to be individuals they decidedly were not. Harrison was actually born into comfortable circumstances in Virginia and had a modest if unremarkable military record...
eBook - ePubThe Imperfect Primary
Oddities, Biases, and Strengths of U.S. Presidential Nomination Politics
- Barbara Norrander(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The Democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, won 51 percent of the popular vote, but Republican Rutherford B. Hayes ultimately won the Electoral College vote 185 to 184. However, getting to the final Electoral College vote involved disputes over electors in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. The election occurred during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. In these three southern states, Democrats and Republicans fought over ballots cast, and all three states reported two different sets of state electors, one for each presidential candidate. Congress created an electoral commission to resolve the discrepancies. The commission was composed of five senators, five members of the U.S. House, and five Supreme Court justices. This commission decided in favor of Hayes. Democrats in Congress protested the decision and threatened a filibuster that would delay the presidential election until after the start of the new presidential term. A deal was struck between the two parties, allowing the Republican Hayes to become president but Democrats would get the removal of northern troops from the southern states. 17 In Chapter 4, the advantages and disadvantages of the reform proposal for a single national primary to nominate presidential candidates were summarized. Many of these same arguments can be applied to proposals to switch the general election vote for president from the Electoral College to the nationwide popular vote. Currently both the nomination phase and the general election phase involve indirect voting: in the primaries, votes for candidates are translated into convention delegates; and in the general election, votes for candidates determine the awarding of a state’s Electoral College votes. Switching to a single-day national primary or using the nationwide popular vote in the fall election would seem to simplify the process. Both proposals are popular with the public...
eBook - ePub- Brian Holden Reid(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Polk, also from Tennessee. Polk was a ‘dark horse’ candidate, who surprisingly seized the Democratic Party nomination in 1844 and defeated the perennial Whig presidential hopeful, Henry Clay, in the election that year. During these interminable and never-ending electoral contests, politics was influenced by two powerful forces. Because the Whigs themselves had been forced to adopt some popularist slogans to oust Jackson’s successor, Van Buren in 1840, all politicians of both parties had to pay obeisance to the ‘common man’, and attempt to demonstrate that political measures and electoral triumphs were ‘a response to grass-roots pressure for change’. This led a conservative party, like the Whigs, into a fundamental paradox that could be resolved only by fielding elderly, military candidates, who could run against discredited Democratic ‘politicians’. The art of government was so uncomplicated, the argument ran, that its simple, basic tasks could be discharged by many men who required no special training or knowledge. 10 The second influence was revivalism, the emotional torrents of which stimulated propagandists on both sides to employ the devices of antithesis, polarization and anathematization that increased the political temperature. Richard Carwardine has also suggested that an increased stress on such techniques in the innumerable elections that occurred every year ‘encouraged them [Whig and Democratic propagandists] to present the election campaign as the agency of political renewal and community redemption’. 11 This led to two features that were inherently unsettling for the American political system. The first is the widespread acceptance among politicians that the United States was born with a political system that embodied perfection; yet this should be subjected to constant change because of the American passion for ‘progress’...
eBook - ePub- A. James Fuller(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- The Kent State University Press(Publisher)
...Introduction The Election of 1860 Reconsidered A. James Fuller The most important presidential election in American history took place in 1860. The electoral contest marked the culmination of the sectional conflict and led to the secession of the Southern states and the beginning of the Civil War. Over the past century and a half, scholars have offered a number of different interpretations of the election, but surprisingly few works have been dedicated exclusively to the presidential contest itself. Most explanations of the campaign appear in general histories or in biographies of Abraham Lincoln or the other presidential candidates. Although nearly every succeeding generation of historians has managed to produce at least one full-length study, scholarship on the election of 1860 remains relatively rare. The sesquicentennial anniversary of the election offered an opportunity to fill this gap in the literature. Historians have taken up the cause, producing several new books on the subject, including this one. 1 This volume reconsiders the election and offers fresh insights on the campaigns for the presidency. In his concluding essay, Douglas G. Gardner examines the historiographical tradition regarding the election, noting that scholars across the generations have focused on Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, with scant attention paid to the other candidates or to other related topics. Two of the essays clearly fall into that scholarly tradition—Michael S. Green argues that Lincoln played the role of master politician during the campaign, and James L. Huston explores the significance of Douglas’s southern tour. The other chapters move in different directions, and even those chapters dedicated to the Rail Splitter and the Little Giant provide new interpretations of the two most famous presidential candidates. But this book breaks new ground by seeing the election as more than Lincoln’s victory and Douglas’s loss...
