1828 Presidential Election
The Presidential Election of 1828 was a significant event in American history, marking the rematch between incumbent President John Quincy Adams and his challenger, Andrew Jackson. Known for its intense and negative campaigning, the election saw Jackson emerge victorious, becoming the 7th President of the United States. This election is often remembered for its role in shaping modern political campaigning.
7 Key excerpts on "1828 Presidential Election"
eBook - ePubWe the Fallen People
The Founders and the Future of American Democracy
- Robert Tracy McKenzie(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- IVP Academic(Publisher)
...Both candidates continued to play the role of the Mute Tribune in public, but a corps of professional politicians on both sides mobilized to build party organizations, raise money, and generate popular enthusiasm from the top down. The Jacksonians took to this more naturally and were better at it than the Adams men, but both sides waged campaigns that were far more aggressive, more coordinated, more expensive, and more polarizing than anything the nation had seen before. There were numerous critical issues confronting the country in 1828— disagreements about banking, tariffs, territorial expansion, international trade, and the place of Native Americans and African Americans in American life, to name the most important—but none of these loomed large in the election of that year. The presidential election of 1828 focused on the candidates themselves, pure and simple. That said, thoughtful discussion of either candidate was in short supply. In its place were ward meetings, state and local conventions, barbecues and banquets, street rallies and parades. There were also campaign buttons, songs, jokes, puns, and cartoons as well as commemorative bandanas, snuffboxes, plates, whiskey flasks, and goblets. Substance was scarce, but slogans and symbols abounded. So did slander. One historian of the election concluded that it “splattered more filth in more different directions and upon more innocent people than any other in American history.” 13 If this was true—some modern observers would claim that honor for more recent campaigns—it was due largely to the countless party newspapers that now dotted the landscape. There had been only ninety newspapers in the country when George Washington took his first oath of office in 1789. By 1828 there were eight hundred, and the vast majority were openly, bitterly partisan. In most instances they owed their survival to income from one faction or the other. Politicians and parties supported newspapers in a variety of ways...
eBook - ePubAmerican Stories
Living American History: v. 1: To 1877
- Jason Ripper(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Politics were becoming openly nasty. Jackson embraced what was soon to be known as the second party system, an echo of the old split between Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists in the 1790s. During the 1830s and 1840s, Jacksonian Democrats and their Whig opponents battled in Congress and in newspapers about the same issues that had been important ever since the Constitutional Convention: what role the federal government should play in the nation; how to manage the economy; what “democracy” should mean and how it should be enacted. Finally, in his loyalty to what he thought of as the will of the people, often called popular sovereignty, Andrew Jackson embodied changes in the American political and social scene. Though he had achieved wealth, status, and political power, common people loved Andrew Jackson for his humble origins and his gruff toughness. Poor residents of the backwoods of the South who had no money to put into a bank, who scratched a living out of the soil with the help of one slave or no slaves—these political customers supported Jackson because he challenged the moneymen and power brokers from the Northeast. Jackson was the first poor people’s president, no matter how many thousands of acres he owned or how many slaves he worked. He wore the populist image well. By the time the election of 1824 arrived, the state representatives of Tennessee had already dragged Jackson out of retirement and made him—once again—a U.S. senator. (Direct election of U.S. senators did not become law until 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution.) Jackson contended for the presidency, but lost to John Quincy Adams, even though Jackson received more Electoral College and popular votes. Because no one had received more than 50 percent of the Electoral College votes, the choice for president was thrown into the House of Representatives, and after many deals had been made, Adams was chosen president...
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...
- Gregory Feldmeth, Christine Custred(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...The campaign was dramatic. The Whigs stressed the depression and the opulent lifestyle of the incumbent in contrast to the simple “log cabin” origins of their candidate. Harrison won a narrow popular victory but swept 80 percent of the electoral vote. Unfortunately for the Whigs, President Harrison died only a month after the inauguration, having served the shortest term in presidential history. The Significance of Jacksonian Politics The Party System The Age of Jackson was the beginning of the modern party system. Popular politics, based on emotional appeal, became the accepted style. The practice of meeting in mass conventions to nominate national candidates for office was established during the Jackson years. The Strong Executive Jackson, more than any president before him, used his office to dominate his party and the government to such an extent that his critics called him “King Andrew.” The Changing Emphasis Toward States’ Rights Andrew Jackson supported the authority of the states against the national government, but he drew the line at the concept of nullification. He advocated a strong union made up of sovereign states, and this created some dissonance in his political thinking. The Supreme Court reflected this shift in thinking in its decision on the Charles River Bridge case in 1837, delivered by Jackson’s new Chief Justice, Roger Taney. He ruled that a state could abrogate a grant of monopoly if that original grant had ceased to be in the best interests of the community. This was clearly a reversal of the Dartmouth College principle of the sanctity of contracts, in a case where the general welfare was perceived as being involved. Party Philosophies The Democrats opposed big government and the requirements of modernization: urbanization and industrialization...
eBook - ePubBuilding the American Republic, Volume 1
A Narrative History to 1877
- Harry L. Watson(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...As their builders had hoped, the allure of the national parties usually prevailed over sectional loyalty. * Americans had greeted the end of the War of 1812 with jubilant celebration and proud assertions of national greatness. Congress felt especially assertive and approved a number of measures that Republicans had once spurned as unconstitutional, especially a national bank and a protective tariff, while nearly adopting a national policy on internal improvements. All three policies became hotly controversial, however, when the Panic of 1819 revealed the most destructive side of the Market Revolution. At the same time, the Missouri crisis revealed the explosive power of the slavery question, especially its tendency to stir violent disputes that might consume the republic in its infancy. In the presidential election of 1824, Andrew Jackson led his rivals, but the eventual victory of John Quincy Adams brought charges of corruption and linked government support for economic development to undemocratic political practices. Lauding “the will of the people” over his enemies’ “corrupt bargain,” Jackson swept to victory in 1828. Jackson and his supporters turned their electoral coalition into a permanent political party by reaching out to ordinary voters with parades, rallies, and entertaining speeches, and by disciplining activists through patronage, nominating conventions, and newspaper coverage. In reaction to Jackson’s Bank War, opposing Whigs created their own party to resist the Democrats, and a Second American Party System emerged to debate the issues aroused by the Market Revolution. The two parties likewise widened access to politics beyond the ranks of eighteenth-century-style elites, and guaranteed that no one could inherit political leadership by default, but must earn it through the noisy, messy rituals of mass democracy...
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- 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...
