A Short History of Presidential Election Crises. Alan Hirsch
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the votes of ninety-nine electors Adams eighty-four, Crawford forty-one, and Clay thirty-seven.
Jackson fell thirty-two electoral votes short of a majority, and thus the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. Under the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, the House would choose among the top three candidates. Under the original Constitution, it had been the top five, and that tweak changed history. Although Clay received more popular votes than Crawford, he received four fewer electoral votes, knocking him out of consideration and thwarting his strategy of prevailing in the House. The House would choose among Jackson, Adams, and Crawford, with Clay relegated to the role of power broker.
The dangers of such a “contingent” election in the House, in which each state gets one vote, had been prophesied in 1823 by Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to a friend, written just 14 months before the 1824 election, the aged Jefferson said that he had long regarded the process of the House selecting the president if no one received a majority of electoral votes “the most dangerous blot on our Constitution, and one which some unlucky chance will someday hit.”16 Jefferson meant hit again. No one knew better than he that the House selecting the President, with all the chicanery that would invite, had already occurred—in 1800, when, despite everyone knowing that the electors intended for Jefferson (and not Aaron Burr) to be President, it took thirty-six ballots and some backroom dealing to produce that result. Now, just twenty-four years later, the nation again faced the prospect of a covert post-election campaign.
While the presidential vote produced potential chaos, the vice presidential tally proved smooth and painless. With a de facto one-party system in effect, there were no president–vice president tickets in 1824. The electors, casting their ballots for vice president without any link to the presidency, overwhelmingly chose Calhoun. He received 182 electoral votes, and no one else more than thirty. Oddly, Calhoun would be re-elected vice president in 1828 even as a new man was elected president. Calhoun was one of just two men in American history to serve as vice president under two presidents. (George Clinton served under Jefferson and Madison.) Given his controversial views and outsize personality, Calhoun does not seem like the vice-presidential type, but history cast him in that role.
On February 9, 1825, the House met to select the president, just as it had done during the election of 1800. But now, with the country more populated, the structural oddity of the process by which the House made its choice was more apparent. Once again, in keeping with the Constitution, each state received one vote. Accordingly, the single congressman from tiny Delaware wielded as much power as New York’s thirty-four representatives. But a single congressman from Kentucky was widely presumed to have the power to determine the next president. Now that he was out of the running, Clay could sway the House to elect Jackson, Adams, or Crawford. Clay was believed to control the House members representing the four states that he had won in November, and perhaps to have influence over others as well. As one Adams supporter observed, either ruefully or hopefully, it was “very much in Clay’s power to make the President.”17
Surrogates of the three remaining candidates aggressively courted Clay. Hypocrisy flourished, as men who had attacked the Speaker for months suddenly discovered his virtues. Clay professed to find the notion that he controlled the House strings “very amusing” and quipped that “the friends of all the three gentlemen are so very courteous, and affectionate, that I sometimes almost wish that it was in my power to accommodate each of them.”18 But Clay scoffed at the prospect of selling his services in exchange for a cabinet position: “I would not cross Pennsylvania Avenue to be in any office under any Administration which lies before us.”19 So he said on December 22, 1824. Maybe he dissembled, maybe he later changed his mind.
Clay never seriously considered supporting Crawford, if only because of the latter’s ill health. From the beginning Clay confided to friends that, if he indeed were the power broker, Adams or Jackson would be the beneficiary. He regarded this choice as the lesser of two evils. “Most probably it will be either Genl. Jackson or Mr. Adams,” Clay wrote a friend on December 13. “And what an alternative that is!”20
Jackson and Clay never got along. By contrast, Adams and Clay had enjoyed a cordial relationship. They had served together on the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, and later, when Clay was Speaker of the House and Adams secretary of state, they worked together on various affairs of state and occasionally dined together. But early in 1822 their relationship soured over a pamphlet written by a Clay supporter who served with both men on the Ghent commission. The pamphlet alleged that Adams sought favorable terms for Great Britain in those negotiations in exchange for benefits to New England fisheries. Adams believed Clay responsible for the pamphlet; Clay angrily denied the charge.
Clay considered Jackson a crude warrior unschooled in legislation and negotiation—Clay’s life work. The only case to be made for supporting Jackson was that he was the closest thing to the people’s choice, having received the most popular and electoral votes. Such consideration could not overcome Clay’s wholesale contempt for Jackson, whose election, Clay surmised, would “give to the Military Spirit a Stimulus and a confidence that might lead to the most pernicious results.”21
Adams had Clay’s respect but not affection, which is pretty much how everyone felt about Adams. From the time of the November election until the House vote in February, Clay hinted to friends that he preferred Adams to Jackson. Sometimes he did more than hint. For example, in a letter to a friend dated December 28, Clay stated that “I have no hesitation in saying that I have long since decided in favor of Mr. Adams.”22 However, he did not make that preference public.
As the date for the House to decide grew nearer, Clay dropped the pretense that he lacked the power to determine the winner or to benefit personally from doing so. In a letter dated January 23, 1825, he stated that “my friends have probably the power of controlling the ultimate result” and, as for the prospect of him securing a cabinet position, “I believe that, if I choose to go into it, I can enter in any situation that I may please.”23 Clay’s dealmaking was a source of constant speculation. Congressman James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a Jackson supporter and future U.S. president, allegedly suggested to Jackson that he promise to appoint Clay secretary of state in return for his support. Jackson angrily nixed the idea.
Rumors also circulated about a Crawford-Jackson bargain. The idea seemed improbable, given the longstanding animosity between the two that had led Jackson to say, in December 1821, that “I would support the Devil first.”24 But a sighting of their wives together ignited conjecture that Jackson and Crawford were in cahoots.
Speculation about Adams and Clay seemed better justified. On January 8, 1825, Clay wrote a friend that he supported Adams, albeit “with great regret.”25 However, he would not tell anyone how to vote and would certainly seek no personal benefit in exchange for his support; his friends in the House should “throw me out of their consideration” and “be guided solely by the public good.”26 The next day, Clay met with Adams, who described their encounter as follows:
Mr. Clay came at six, and spent the evening with me in long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future. He said that the time was drawing near when the choice must be made in the House of Representatives of a President . . . [and] that he had been much urged and solicited with regard to the part in the transaction that he should take. . . . The time has now come at which he might be explicit in his communication with me. . . . 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.27
Adams suggested that Clay had in fact done some bargaining, but not of the improper sort: “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.”28
From the beginning, there was widespread suspicion to the contrary. When a majority of the Ohio and Kentucky delegations (states Clay had carried in November) announced their support for Adams on January 24, an anonymous member of Congress charged that Adams bought Clay’s support with the promise to make him secretary of state. Clay demanded that his unnamed colleague come