A Short History of Presidential Election Crises. Alan Hirsch
But the Founders knew a constitutional crisis when they saw one, and looked to amend the Constitution to prevent a recurrence. The Twelfth Amendment was proposed in December 1803 and ratified in June 1804, in time to govern the 1804 election. The amendment is roughly 370 words (a page and a half, typed), much of it confusing or peripheral. But it did the heavy lifting in a few sentences: “[The electors] shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President. . . . The person having the greatest number of votes for President shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. . . . The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President.”
By separating the votes for president and vice president, the amendment promised to avert repeats of the untoward scenarios from the two previous elections. It would now be possible for a party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees effectively to run as a ticket, without fear of them ending up tied for president, à la 1800, and without someone from the opposing party sneaking in to become vice president, à la 1796.
It worked as planned in 1804. The 162 electors who voted for Jefferson for president cast a separate ballot for his running mate, Governor George Clinton, for vice president. Unlike in 1800, when Burr received presidential votes along with Jefferson, Clinton received no presidential votes: no inadvertent tie, no crisis in the House. And unlike 1796, when Jefferson and Adams were forced together into a schizophrenic administration, now Jefferson and his vice president served harmoniously.
Unfortunately, while the Twelfth Amendment prevented repeats of the 1796 and 1800 fiascos, its drafters failed to anticipate other ways in which a presidential election might go off the rails. Just twenty years later, the election of 1824 produced another constitutional crisis. The problem stemmed from the provision that, if no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the president shall be determined by the House of Representatives. To be sure, that provision also contributed to the crisis in 1800, but for a different reason: In 1824, the failure of any candidate to receive a majority resulted not from a tie but rather from a multicandidate field—four candidates with significant support.
When it comes to the scenario in which no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the Twelfth Amendment simply imported the language of the original Constitution (apart from one tweak, noted next chapter). Accordingly, the possibility of a deadlocked House, and all the mischief and chicanery that could bring, remained. In 1824, the nation paid the price for that provision: When none of the four candidates received a majority of electoral votes, the election went to the House, where it was eventually resolved in a fashion so dangerous that it risked fomenting rebellion.
TWO
ELECTION OF 1824
James Monroe served as president from 1816 to 1824, a period misleadingly termed the “Era of Good Feeling.” It was actually a time of considerable national contentiousness over, among other things, the treatment of Native Americans, slavery, a national bank, and tariffs. Despite the fractiousness, Monroe was easily elected and re-elected president. In 1816, he received 183 out of the 217 electoral votes. More impressive, in 1820 he received all but one of the 232 electoral votes. (For some reason, one elector opted for John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s secretary of state.)
Monroe’s electoral dominance stemmed from the absence of significant opposition. The Federalists, considerably weakened during the Jefferson administration, slowly withered away as a national force following the War of 1812. Any “good feeling” in the period thereafter resulted from the absence of competing parties. Monroe’s near-unanimous victory in 1820 echoed George Washington’s, but with a major difference. When Washington was elected unanimously in 1788, there were no parties. Now there was one: the Republicans. Hence Monroe’s coronation.
But politics abhors a vacuum. With Monroe poised to follow the precedent established by Washington and step down after his second term, every prominent politician could see himself in the White House. The year 1824 promised to be the opposite of 1820: the one-man “race” replaced by a multicandidate scrum. The names of at least seventeen potential candidates were bandied about.
No matter who prevailed, the election would witness a generational passing of the torch. Unlike his would-be successors, Monroe was a Founding Father—he fought in the Revolutionary War, served in the Continental Congress, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1790, and was appointed secretary of state by President James Madison. As a matter of political and historical logic, it made sense for him to pass the baton to his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. The position of secretary of state had become the standard stepping stone—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had all served in that position before becoming president. Moreover, Adams was literally a second-generation Founder—the oldest son of America’s first vice president and second president, John Adams.
By virtue of upbringing, experience, and intellect, John Quincy Adams was probably the most qualified person ever to seek the presidency. As a toddler, he accompanied his father around Europe during the latter’s diplomatic missions. A standout student at Harvard who built a promising legal practice, Adams was just twenty-seven when George Washington appointed him minister to Prussia in 1794. In 1803, he was chosen U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Young Adams shared his father’s disdain for political parties, including their own Federalist Party. His mutual antipathy with leading Federalists led to his resignation from the Senate in 1808. He then briefly became a Harvard professor, but left the post when named minister to Russia by President Madison in 1809. He stayed in that position for five years, before Madison appointed him to the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812. Adams was subsequently appointed secretary of state by President Monroe in 1817, and formulated the Monroe Doctrine opposing European colonialism in the Americas.
If Adams’s credentials were unimpeachable, the same could not be said for his personality and temperament. Even friends found him aloof; he made little effort to conceal his sense of superiority. Adams also inherited his father’s thin skin. As the presidential pre-campaign heated up in the winter of 1822, he complained that “no man in America has made his way through showers of ribaldry and invective . . . more frequent and various than I have breasted.”8
This personal prickliness dovetailed with a political problem: He was virtually a man without a party. The remnants of the Federalists considered him an apostate. He effectively switched to the Republicans (now the only national party), but they regarded him as a Johnny-come-lately. Despite his impeccable qualifications, in the early stages of the 1824 election, Adams was not considered the front-runner.
That designation belonged to Monroe’s secretary of the treasury, William Crawford, a native-born Virginian (though his parents moved to South Carolina and later Georgia when he was young). Crawford’s election as president would have continued the Virginia dynasty—for thirty-one of the nation’s first thirty-five years, a Virginian occupied the president’s seat. He shared not only George Washington’s home state, but also his imposing physique, standing six foot three and weighing more than two hundred pounds. A states-rights Republican, the hot-tempered Crawford participated in two duels, killing a man in 1802 and suffering a severe wound in 1806. But that hardly distinguished him in this field. Three of the five major candidates (Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay as well as Crawford) had fought in duels. Remarkably, at the time duels were widely considered an acceptable means of dispute resolution.
The less bloody part of Crawford’s impressive résumé included a term in the U.S. Senate followed by service in several prominent positions in the Madison administration: minister to France during the War of 1812, secretary of war, and secretary of the treasury. Supporters urged Crawford to pursue the presidency in 1816, but he deferred to Monroe—and nevertheless came in a close second for the Republican Party’s nomination. Monroe kept Crawford on at the Department of the Treasury, where he “sat serenely . . . awaiting his turn at the Presidency with every assurance of success, only to be suddenly surprised by the appearance in the field of a swarm of candidates.”9
One of those candidates, another perceived powerhouse and member of Monroe’s cabinet, was John C. Calhoun. The South Carolinian prodigy