A Short History of Presidential Election Crises. Alan Hirsch
Litchfield Law School in Connecticut—before returning to South Carolina and establishing a successful law practice. Calhoun was elected to the state legislature at the age of twenty-six in 1808 and to the U.S. House two years later. The anti-British war hawk achieved prominence by pushing for the War of 1812. He ran unopposed for Congress in 1812 and 1814 and was appointed secretary of war by Monroe in 1817. In December 1821, Calhoun formally accepted the invitation of several congressmen to announce his interest in the presidency, becoming the first in the field to declare.
Although he would later acquire notoriety for advocating for the South’s secession from the Union, in the early 1820s Calhoun preached no such heresies. On the contrary, Adams pronounced him “above all sectional and factious prejudices more than any other statesman of the Union with whom I have ever acted.”10 In Congress, Calhoun had been a stalwart supporter of the second national bank, and as secretary of war, he strengthened the U.S. Army. In 1824, Calhoun was a distinctly national, rather than regional, candidate.
Adams, Crawford, and Calhoun, all prominent members of Monroe’s cabinet, were joined as presidential candidates by Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. Like Crawford, Clay was born in Virginia but raised elsewhere in the South (in his case, Kentucky). Like Adams and Calhoun, he became an accomplished lawyer before turning to politics. Clay was elected to the Kentucky state legislature in 1803, appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1806 and 1809 to fill unexpired terms, then elected to the House in 1810 and immediately made Speaker. Like Calhoun, he pushed for U.S. entry into the War of 1812, and like Adams, he accepted President Madison’s appointment to the commission that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent. But Clay rebuffed Madison’s effort to join his cabinet, remaining until 1820 in the House, where he crafted the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and established himself as a leading critic of the Monroe administration.
Financial problems led Clay to resign his seat rather than seek re-election in 1820; he took a more lucrative position as attorney for the Bank of the U.S. in the West. But he again ran for the House in 1822, was elected, and was again chosen Speaker. As cheerful as Adams was dour, Clay was a charismatic orator and powerhouse Speaker of the House. He managed to be both a voice for the West and a militant nationalist, a lifelong advocate of an economic program termed the “American System,” which combined protective tariffs, transportation development, and a national bank.
General Andrew Jackson, the sole veteran in the field of candidates, was a veritable war hero. Eventually it would become commonplace for soldiers to use their experience as a stepping stone to politics (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all rode their military exploits to the White House), but Jackson was the first presidential candidate since George Washington with a background on the battlefield rather than traditional political experience. Jackson’s warrior days began young, when he skirmished against the British as a thirteen-year-old boy. He was captured and allegedly wounded when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots. Such a beginning fits with Jackson’s defiant personality. His father died before he was born, and his mother while he was a teen. The unrestrained orphan lived large and dangerously.
Trained as an attorney, as were all the major presidential candidates, Jackson became a successful prosecutor in his home state of Tennessee. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1796, and shortly thereafter selected to fill a Senate vacancy (when his ally William Blount was expelled for conspiring with Great Britain). Jackson, who disliked the Senate, resigned and returned home in 1798. He was almost immediately elected judge on the state superior court and in 1802 was appointed a major-general in the Tennessee militia. Jackson retired as a judge in 1803, but remained a militia leader, leading to his appointment as a major-general in the U.S. Army. His victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, the last major battle of the War of 1812, furthered his reputation as a warrior. In 1823, a group of his supporters—the so-called “Nashville Junto”—helped get him elected to the U.S. Senate, which they saw as his path to the presidency. Jackson was a slaveholder and unabashed white supremacist, and his military exploits included tremendous violence against Native Americans, but to the white male electorate in 1824, these were not necessarily disadvantages.
The quintet of top-shelf candidates—Adams, Crawford, Calhoun, Clay, and Jackson—ensured the breaking of at least one presidential streak. By 1824, the White House had been occupied by Virginians for twenty-four consecutive years, and the last three presidents had previously served as secretary of state. Adams, the only present or former secretary of state in contention, hailed from Massachusetts.
Each of the five candidates had a plausible path to the presidency. Calhoun, Crawford, and Adams, major figures in the popular Monroe administration, could each be seen as a logical successor. (Monroe maintained an official neutrality, but was suspected of pulling strings behind the scenes to help Calhoun.) Clay, for his part, needed only to finish in the top three, provided that no one receive a majority of the electoral votes. The election would then be thrown to the House of Representatives, where he, the Speaker, would be the overwhelming favorite. In his diary, John Quincy Adams noted rumors that Clay had come out of retirement to reclaim his position as Speaker precisely as “a step for his own promotion to the Presidency on the very probable contingency that the election would fall to the House of Representatives.”11 Meanwhile, the war hero Jackson enjoyed the greatest popularity with ordinary Americans, and benefited from the kind of grass-roots campaign that was at the time uncommon in America.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, there would be much reference to the “endless campaign” or “perpetual campaign” for president. As it happens, the phenomenon of the next presidential election starting virtually as soon as the previous one concludes goes way back. In January 1822, with Monroe’s second term less than a year old, the political writer Hezekiah Niles lamented the excessive time spent by politicians and others “in electioneering for the next President of the United States.”12 A few months later, another journalist noted that the “electioneering begins to wax hot.”13
The election of 1824 was, in a sense, the first modern presidential election, replete with campaign biographies, straw polls, and other campaign accoutrements that would eventually become commonplace. Many state legislatures held conventions that drafted resolutions endorsing a candidate. On February 14, 1824, the U.S. Congress held its quadrennial “caucus” to anoint its own candidate. This had become the traditional means for Republicans to select their nominee, but in 1824 the caucus came under heavy criticism for bypassing the people at large. As a result, all but Crawford’s supporters (and even some of them) boycotted the caucus. Crawford received sixty-two of the sixty-six votes cast, but this Valentine’s Day massacre may actually have harmed his candidacy, since Crawford was tarred as the beneficiary of an elitist cabal. A Jackson supporter from Pennsylvania expressed a widespread sentiment when he attacked the caucus as a game played by “the friends of a single individual, held in utter disregard or defiance of the known wishes of the Democratic Party in Congress and throughout the Union.”14
Five months earlier, in September 1823, Crawford had suffered a greater blow—a stroke that left him paralyzed and blind. However, he gradually recovered mobility and vision in the months ahead without the public ever learning about the seriousness of his condition, and he remained in the race until the end. (He survived for a full decade after the election.) If the truth about Crawford’s extreme condition failed to derail his candidacy, the inverse occurred with Clay: False rumors of ill health fueled speculation that he had dropped out of the race, and thus significantly impeded his candidacy. Clay would later blame his defeat on “fabrications of tales of my withdrawal.”15
Despite their struggles, Crawford and Clay survived as major candidates—unlike Calhoun. When some of his strongest supporters defected to Jackson in early 1824, Calhoun could see the writing on the wall and made known his intention to seek the vice presidency instead of the top spot.
With Calhoun out and Clay and Crawford suffering serious setbacks, Jackson and Adams pulled ahead in the final months. When the votes were counted on December 6, 1824, Jackson received 152,901, or 41 percent of all votes cast; Adams received 114,023 (31 percent); Clay 47,217 (13 percent); and Crawford 46,979 (13 percent). The Electoral College vote tracked the