Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
stupefy the world. After five presidencies and 50 years after the American Revolution began, the new republic was fairly launched.
Taken as a whole, in just one lifetime, from the start of the Seven Years’ War to 1824, the Americans had had an astounding rise, from a colony with two million people to one of the world’s six or seven most important countries, with over 11 million people. The problem of being half slave-holding and half free was the only shadow over America’s prospects, but it was a dark and lengthening shadow. Jefferson, the unimpoverishable optimist, in his final years, yet had “twinges of fear of an impending disaster whose sources he never fully understood. He and his colleagues had created” (and nurtured) “a Union devoted to liberty that contained an inner flaw that nearly proved to be its undoing.” Madison, who died 10 years after Jefferson and Adams, in 1836, left the posthumous word that “There was a serpent creeping with his deadly wiles” in the American “paradise.”7 So there was, and the great strategic challenge now was to keep the Union together until the forces of federalism in the North and West would be adequately motivated and powerful to suppress the slave states, if either moral revulsion at slavery or a preemptive insurrection made that necessary to preserve the Union.
War of 1812. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History
10. THE 1824 ELECTION AND PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
As the Virginia Dynasty ended, there was jockeying for the succession in Monroe’s talented cabinet. John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and John C. Calhoun were all presumed to be running for president, as was the populist general Andrew Jackson. The country was practically a one-party state, and the states objected to the practice of the Democratic-Republican caucus of the House of Representatives choosing the party’s nominee and, effectively, the president. The Tennessee legislature selected General Jackson as a candidate in 1822, which was a year after Calhoun had thrown his hat in the ring, and so fierce was the rivalry that Crawford, who had great influence in the Senate, blocked the promotion of officers favored by Calhoun as war secretary, sometimes even when they were supported by the president himself. The Massachusetts and Kentucky legislatures nominated their favorite sons, Adams and the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, all in 1822. Monroe launched the concept of the “lame duck” president, well before it was called that.
A stroke effectively eliminated Crawford, who had been selected by the House caucus in the traditional manner, in 1823, and Calhoun withdrew to run for vice president with both Jackson and Adams. Jackson ran in favor of popular election of the president, but against federally paid internal improvements, which were held to be intrusive by the federal government, and if permitted, likely to be followed by federal meddling in the status of slavery. Most of the candidates favored tariff protection for American manufacturing. The ballot yielded 99 electoral votes for Jackson, 84 for Adams, 41 for Crawford, and 37 for Clay. As there was no majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which would consider only the top three candidates. Clay urged support for Adams and, as Speaker, exercised considerable influence, starting with causing the Kentucky congressmen to ignore the instruction of the state legislature to vote for Jackson, and vote for Adams instead. Adams won 13 states to seven for Jackson and four for Crawford. Clay accepted Adams’s offer of secretary of state, leading to the allegation of a “corrupt bargain” by the two to throw the House election to Adams. There was never any evidence of this, but it was much bandied about, including by the erratic and volcanic John Randolph, who also described Adams and Clay as “the Puritan and the blackleg.” This led to a duel, in which neither aggrieved party (Clay and Randolph) was injured. Calhoun was easily elected vice president.
After this election, the Adams and Clay groups became National Republicans, while the Jacksonians became the successors to Jefferson and Madison as Democratic-Republicans. Adams declined to politicize the civil service and dismissed only 12 federal government employees in his term, and those for objective cause. It was an admirable stance, but nothing was going to stop the charge of Jackson, swearing vengeance for the corrupt bargain and claiming to be the spear of the people as they seized control of government from the elites. In his address to the Congress in December 1825, Adams proposed an extensive program of roads and canals, a national university and observatory, and further exploration of the interior. It was an ambitious program, but one bound to offend the states’ rights advocates, which included all the South and much of the Southwest, essentially because of fear of attacks on slavery. This was the key to discussion of federal aid to public works, and was indicative of self-defeating government minimalism. It was held that if the federal government had the power to build public works all over the country, there would then be nothing to stop it from tampering with slavery. The South was already retreating into a slave mentality. Calhoun, as president of the Senate, elevated many opponents of the administration, as he was now the South’s leading political figure and used his position to advance his own status and not to support the administration (having probably received more votes for his office from followers of Jackson than of Adams).
The whole first half of 1826 was taken up with debate over U.S. attendance at the Panama Conference. This was a pan–Latin American meeting organized by the liberator of much of South America, Simón Bolívar, who was seeking a tight alliance between all the states against Spain or any outside interloper. He sought a continental assembly and the right to require military support and solidarity from all constituent states. Colombia and Mexico insisted that the United States be invited, and Adams agreed to be represented. This created awkwardnesses; where Adams and Clay believed that American preeminence in the hemisphere required American representation, Calhoun and Senator Martin Van Buren, a devious New York wheelhorse who would hold almost every elective office and champion different sides of many issues, opposed U.S. attendance, ostensibly because the Senate had not been consulted before Adams accepted the invitation, and because attendance would violate American opposition to intrusion in the affairs of other countries. The real reason for the concern of the South was that there would be black national leaders present and they did not wish to exalt the dignity of “negroes” ethnically indistinguishable from slaves.
The Congress supported the administration, after vigorous debate, but the representatives Adams sent did not arrive, one because of death en route. That there should have been a heated six-month debate on such a trivial issue illustrated the extreme sensitivity of the slavery issue. Southern leaders overreacted, reacted preemptively, and generally betrayed a nearly paranoid fear of criticism of slavery. Calhoun was the leader of this strain of opinion, and Van Buren went along with it only to cement his relations with Jackson, whom he saw more clearly than some as the coming man.
Thomas Jefferson, aged 83, and John Adams, aged 91, died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s last words were alleged to have been that “Jefferson survives.” They had mended their quarrels of decades before and enjoyed an extensive and often eloquent correspondence. Adams had the pleasure, as the only president to this point to have been denied reelection, of seeing his son installed as president, at time of writing a feat replicated only by the Bushes. The senior Adams and Jefferson had seen a tremendous advance of the country they had done so much to establish, including a steady advance of popular government, a discarding of property and tax-paying qualifications for voting, and the movement in all states except Delaware and South Carolina of the selection of presidential electors from the state legislators directly to the voters.
The North-South divisions were aggravated by the tariff debates of the late twenties. Northern and central manufacturing states wanted higher tariffs for textiles and steel and iron goods, to protect their ever-growing domestic market, while the South wanted those goods to be cheaper, and did not want to provoke tariff retaliation by the wide range of foreign countries to which the South exported agricultural products and cotton. The South was fiercely attached to the principle of absolute equality with the North, which it was losing demographically, though it was maintained in the Senate. As the North grew more quickly, and tariffs prospered its own industries while handicapping those of the South, and the North aspersed slavery and the ownership by people of other human beings, southerners