Jonathan White: 1824 & Contentious Elections | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 [Music] hi this is tony williams senior fellow at the bill of rights institute and we are pleased to bring you another episode of scholar talks for this episode we are honored to have scholar jonathan white who is going to discuss the election of 1824

0:20 related to his dramatic essay for our new bri textbook life liberty and the pursuit of happiness jonathan white is an associate professor of american studies at christopher newport university and is the author or editor of 10 books including abraham lincoln and treason in the civil war

0:41 the trials of john merriman and emancipation the union army and the re-election of abraham lincoln which was a finalist for both the lincoln prize a very prestigious award and the winner of the abraham lincoln’s institute book prize he has published more than 100

1:02 articles essays and reviews and he serves on the board of directors of the abraham lincoln institute the abraham lincoln association the lincoln forum and the john l now the third center for civil war history at the university of virginia he also serves on the ford’s theater advisory council

1:23 in 2017 c-span invited him to participate in its survey of presidential leadership his most recent books include lincoln on law leadership and life and our little monitor the greatest invention of the civil war he is presently writing a biography of a convicted slave trader named

1:44 appleton oaksmith check out his website at jonathanwhite.org or follow him on twitter at civil war john john you’ve certainly been very very busy as a scholar and quite accomplished uh we want to welcome you and thank you for joining us thank you so much for having me great uh

2:05 and thank you for your peace for our uh new textbook there’s a piece is i should say uh really magnificent thank you thank you i actually in a lot of ways enjoy reading and writing about the early republic as much as sometimes more than the civil war believe it or not great well i i don’t believe you considering what i just read but uh yeah your specialty is civil war era

2:28 but uh uh we we asked you to uh move a little bit back in time and and stretch your muscles a little bit so thank you well should we jump right into the conversation all right great well uh can you explain some of the general historical background of an expanding republic after the war of 1812 that helped

2:49 shape the election of 1824 help us help us set that scene please sure the period after the war of 1812 is often known as the the era of good feeling and the idea was the united states was able to defeat the british for a second time kick them out of the united states again and in light of this victory

3:11 there was a great national popular mood the mood of the nation had gone up considerably after the victory in the war of 1812. and in 1816 there was a presidential election and james monroe of virginia was able to defeat rufus king of new york and rufus king was a federalist and he’s really the last federalist to run for president the

3:33 federalist party had opposed the war of 1812 they were a largely regional party in new england and they had actually voted some members of congress had voted against supplies for the troops and that was a very unpopular thing to do in a democratic society you never want to vote against the troops and so you’ve got the election of 1816

3:56 and king loses in a landslide to james monroe of virginia and that is really the end of the federalist party and so at this point then you have everyone basically considers themselves a national republican and so there’s no two-party system as there had been for you know two decades or so before the

4:17 election of 1816 and so people have a good feeling about how the nation is is going at that point james monroe as president sees himself more as the head of the nation than as the head of a party and he tries to bring about or promote national unity in the united states and in fact when he ran for re-election

4:38 in 1820 he ran unopposed and he wins virtually all of the popular vote and almost all of the electoral college in 1820 so it looked like the nation was in this sort of period of peace and prosperity but there were some uh there were some problems that were going on beneath the surface

4:58 there were regional issues that were starting to divide the nation the nation had just debated the missouri compromise which involved slavery and that seemed to resolve this massive issue of slavery at least for the time being where they draw a line between the the middle of the missouri the louisiana purchase and say north of

5:19 this line is going to be free territory south of this line will be slave and then they bring in missouri as a slave state and maine as a free state and so they seem to be having compromises that are able to maintain some sense of national unity but the reality is the the divisions that were emerging in the nation we’re really going to take center stage

5:39 and you would especially see that by the time you get to the election of 1824. some of those divisions as i mentioned had to do with slavery and they were regional in nature some of them had to do with economic policy with tariffs northern manufacturers want tariffs whereas southerners tend to oppose tariffs some of these issues have to do with national versus state power

6:00 in 1819 there had been a very important supreme court decision called mccullough versus maryland where the state of maryland went head-to-head with the national government over whether or not the state could tax the national bank and so this idea of states rights is also going to be very divisive in the nation and then also the last thing i would say

6:21 about some of the problems emerging in this period was there was a panic in 1819 an economic crisis known as the panic of 1819 and that is going to hurt working class americans and so they are going to see their interests as not being protected and so while on the surface there seems to be this period of expansion and national unity

6:41 there were some major problems brewing and what’s interesting is that you can see those regional divisions emerging in monroe’s cabinet three of his cabinet members who represent different regional interests would uh be serving in his cabinet and then run for president in 1824. okay so yeah so how do we go from that

7:04 national politics of monroe winning a virtually uncontested presidential election in 1820 to to one of the most contentious elections in in history in 1824 yeah so a lot of it has to do with this again idea that monroe sees himself as the leader of the nation and not a party and so today there is something called

7:26 party discipline and if you’ve got say members of the senate or members of the house of representatives from a party and they go against their party leadership then the party leadership will punish them maybe strip them from holding a powerful committee chair in congress something like that and and the reality was that there was no party

7:47 discipline that monroe was able to exercise because of the fact that there was one party and so his cabinet became somewhat divisive as there’s different regional people who are um vying for power and vying to be his successor okay so those that that one party system just can’t endure right

8:10 because people have different interests and because they’re they’re they’re looking at the world in a different way and so forth and those things come to the surface as you’re pointing out that’s right and they’re all all of the candidates in 1824 are going to run under the same party label of national republican but that’ll be the last time that that sort of thing happens right

8:30 great well that’s a great segue into who did run and what constituencies did actually each of those four candidates represent in the election yeah so there’s four major candidates who are going to run in 1824. initially there was five the fifth one would be john c calhoun he was secretary of war in monroe’s cabinet and he saw how

8:53 crowded the field was so he decided to not run for president and instead run for vice president and he was able to win that pretty easily calhoun is a really interesting person because originally he was a nationalist but then he would go on to become the most famous states rights and pro-slavery advocate from south carolina

9:13 in the antebellum period so the four candidates who wind up running in 1824 are andrew jackson of tennessee john quincy adams of massachusetts william h crawford of georgia and henry clay of kentucky so i’ll sort of take them one by one and one of the most important aspects to

9:33 realize is that personality and character really mattered for a lot of these guys so andrew jackson of tennessee is a is a common man he is an orphan from a young age he is a very tough guy he’s a man’s man during the american revolution a british officer had captured him and his brother and the british officer had said to

9:54 jackson shine my boots and jackson refused and the officer took his sword and slashed it down at jackson and jackson raised up his arm to block the blow and ended up taking the blunt of it of the blow the rear side of the sword against his face and it gave him a scar for the rest of his life and that gives you a sense of why jackson had such

10:16 disdain for the british he was about 13 years old or so when that took place by the time the 1790s rolls around he becomes a very popular politician he then becomes a militia general and he’s very famous in 1815 for leading an army against the british in the defense of new orleans and jackson had something like a couple

10:36 thousand men and the british came at him with much larger numbers and he he set up a strong defense of new orleans and was able to inflict something like 2 000 casualties on the british invaders and suffered only about 13 for himself and so jackson becomes a war hero he is known for his dueling and for the

10:57 rest for his entire adult life jackson carries bullets around inside of him from duels that he had fought in and so he is a champion of the common man he’s a military hero he represents the interests of what was then known as the west places like tennessee and kentucky and um the midwest and the southwest

11:18 but he also has an appeal in the south and some appeal with ordinary people in the mid-atlantic and so jackson is going to be one of the candidates to run in 1824. a second one is going to be john quincy adams john quincy adams is a very different type of person he is the son of a president he’s from massachusetts

11:38 he is serving as secretary of state in monroe’s cabinet and he’s going to appeal to new england and to the mid-atlantic states as well he has uh he’s going to appeal to the elites of the nation third candidate is henry clay henry clay was born in virginia but is known as a kentuckian that’s where he’s going to spend his adult life

11:59 henry clay is a very powerful man in this period he is speaker of the u.s house of representatives which is a very powerful position to have he is a perennial candidate for president throughout his adult life i think he runs for president five times he’s never able to win he gets close once or twice but uh he’s the guy who keeps trying and

12:19 never can quite get there clay is a is a pro-union slave owner in kentucky and he is known as a great compromiser for clay he is devoting his life to doing what he can to preserve the union and he’ll do that most famously i think in 1850 where he tries to push the compromise of 1850 through

12:41 to save the union at that point clay supports internal improvements so he wants money to be allocated from the federal government to do things like build bridges and roads for the sake of the nation being able to spread westward and increase commerce and this is a system known as the american system and clay is going to

13:01 appeal to western voters people in his state of kentucky and in that region and then the final candidate is william h crawford and crawford is a really interesting and important figure in this period he’s almost completely unknown today i mean i don’t think one in a million americans would know who william crawford was today

13:22 but in his time he was a very prominent person in the era of good feeling he actually came within a spade of defeating james monroe for the nomination for president in 1816 and he lost but he was very close to winning the presidency in 1816. he winds up becoming and he like jackson is someone who rose from obscurity

13:44 he rose from obscurity to become a u.s senator and then minister to france and then secretary of war and then in monroe’s cabinet he’s serving as secretary of treasury and he’s a georgian he’s going to appeal to southerners they are going to uh be supportive of crawford’s candidacy andrew he was a very tall man a very large man a very handsome man

14:06 but in 1823 he suffered a stroke and that hurt his health considerably it actually happened because his physician had prescribed some medicine that you know the medicine back then didn’t do quite what it was supposed to do and he had a stroke a year before but he still was able to win a nomination for president in 1824 and he will be one of the primary

14:27 contenders that year great and the real drama of the election i would argue really occurs after election day the election is thrown into the house of representatives because no one had received the necessary number of votes in the electoral college now i would argue this wasn’t

14:50 really a crisis as some might assume because the constitution actually does provide an orderly process for just such a scenario and so me can you walk us through that constitutional process sure i always i love teaching this material to my students and i i use

15:10 federalist number 39 when i do that so federalist 39 is written by james madison and madison makes the argument that the united states constitution embodies two major principles the federal principle and the national principle and by the federal principle he means it’s state centered in certain ways and then by the national principle he means

15:32 that the constitution represents the people of the nation as a whole and so he points to different ways that the federal and national principles are embodied in the constitution and one of the ways the national principle is embodied in the constitution is in the house of representatives the people vote as a whole and they are represented in proportion to their

15:53 population in the house the senate by contrast represents the federal principle so in in those days the senators were elected by state legislatures and every state had an equal number of senators well we still do two per state and so the the congress itself is a balance of the

16:14 federal and the national principles now the our representation in congress is what then becomes the basis for the electoral college so each state gets a certain number of votes in the electoral college and that number is based not on population of the state but on the number of members of the house that each state has

16:34 plus the number of senators and so madison’s idea partly federal partly national is then embodied in the electoral college so wyoming would have three votes today because they have two senators they have one member of the house so they get three votes california gets 55 votes they have 53 members of the house they have two senators so they get 55

16:55 and in the allocation of members of the house of representatives each state balances the federal and national principles now the question then becomes what happens if no one wins a majority of the electoral college well they came up with a contingency plan and that is the election gets thrown into the house now the house again represents that

17:17 national principle and the founders wanted to maintain balance and so instead of just letting the house decide as a whole what they decided was each state would get one vote each state delegation in the house would get one vote so california with its 55 delegates would decide amongst themselves who’s

17:37 going to get california’s vote and wyoming with its one representative is going to decide who am i going to vote for and so even in this really strange contingency plan the constitution tries to balance these two competing principles of federal and national representing the nation as a whole and also representing the states right and so then it’s just majority

17:59 rule once the uh so by state majority rule by state that’s right in the state so it embodies so many principles as you’re saying from the you know so many constitutional principles and it’s really quite an elegant solution and it sounds complicated but really you explain it very well and i i

18:21 love the connection a really nice connection over to federalist 39 i think that that explains things really nicely yeah well henry clay ends up playing a very interesting uh if very controversial role at the time in the house of representatives when when the election does go to the house who you explained a little bit about

18:42 henry clay is and so what role does he play in the house and then what do his critics argue about that role yeah so the election takes place in the fall of 1824 and as you mentioned no one wins a majority of the electoral college and that’s what you need to do in order to win an election win a

19:03 majority of the electoral college so jackson carries 40 more than 41 percent of the vote and he gets 99 votes in the electoral college adams carries about 31 percent of the vote he gets 84 votes in the electoral college crawford carries about 11 of the vote and he gets 41 votes in the electoral college and then clay he actually gets more popular votes than

19:24 crawford he gets about 13 of the popular vote but he comes in last in the electoral college and gets 37 and in order to win the election that year you needed to have 131 votes in the electoral college so jackson comes closest he has 99 but he doesn’t get to 131 and so the election goes to the house now the 12th amendment stipulates

19:46 that only the top three vote getters in the electoral college will go into the house and so jackson adams and crawford then are the three who get put before the house of representatives if clay had been among the top three he almost certainly would have won because he was speaker of the house he wielded a tremendous amount of power

20:07 and he he could have easily swayed things in his direction but he was not there and and so he now is going to essentially be in the position of king maker and clay did not necessarily want any of these other three to win but if you look at who he would probably align most with he and adams are both uh more inclined

20:28 towards things like internal improvements and so clay is going to eventually put his support behind adams now this story is you know the historical record is a little unclear but what appears to have happened is that adams and clay have a meeting in january of 1825 and they don’t lay out the specific

20:49 details of what exactly is going to happen but they essentially and they do that for deniability but they essentially come to an agreement where henry clay will help john quincy adams win the election and in return henry clay will be made secretary of state and secretary of state was a really important position back then because that was seen as the stepping

21:11 stone to the presidency today we often think about the vice presidency as being the stepping stone but back then secretary of state was a real stepping stone to the presidency and so they they make this agreement and the election is going to go before the house on february 9 1825. now in order to win that election you need 13 states 13 state delegations

21:34 to support your candidacy and if you were to do a straw poll going into that election day the estimated tallies were that adams had 12 state delegations jackson had seven and crawford had four and new york was unpledged new york had 34 members of the house and they were evenly divided and um

21:56 and so it was between crawford and adams for new york and so new york would probably be the the state that would decide the election now martin van buren was in the house of representatives and he was a crawford man and what what van buren really wanted was for new york to hold out and for the other states to begin changing their votes and even though

22:19 crawford was in third place he hoped that crawford might be able to move up and that was totally within the realm of possibility but clay was set on getting new york to give its vote to adams and so on the morning of the election a new york congressman named steven van rensselaer who was pledged to crawford is walking

22:39 in to the house of representatives and clay and daniel webster who’s this really important figure in 19th century american law and politics they get van rensselaer and they hustle him into the speaker’s office and they rough him up a little bit and they put some pressure on him you know you gotta vote for adams you gotta vote for adams and van rensselaer this poor guy is all

23:01 shaken up by this and he goes into the house chamber which is now statuary hall and he sits down at his desk and van rensselaer is a very religious man and he bows his head at his desk and he prays you know dear lord please tell me who i should vote for in this election and he opens his eyes and there at his

23:22 feet is a ballot for adams and van rensleer takes this as a sign from god that he’s supposed to switch his vote from crawford to adams and he does that and adams then wins new york which then gives him the election in the house and shortly after the election adams appoints henry clay

23:42 as secretary of state and andrew jackson was just furious at this and he called it a corrupt bargain he complete he compared henry clay to judas the man who in the bible betrays jesus for 30 pieces of silver who’s then later hanged now it’s really important to realize jackson did not challenge the result of the election he

24:03 didn’t go to court he didn’t say i’ve been swindled he looked at the he thought he had been wronged but he knew that according to the rules of the constitution this was how it could be decided but he vowed that he would run again in four years and he did and four years later he was able to win both the popular vote and the electoral college easily and win

24:26 his way into the presidency what role does this election of 1824 play in the formation of what historians call the second party system and that increasing democratization of the jacksonian era yeah it plays a very important role

24:46 because jackson again is so upset at having lost the 1824 election that he is going to mobilize to win in 1828 and this really is the the formation of the democratic party the modern democratic party they’re going to coalesce around jackson as their candidate they’re going to have a national campaign it again is

25:08 is centered very much on his personality and they’re going to go out in large numbers to have rallies and barbecues and they’re going to raise polls you know during the american revolution they’d raise liberty polls to celebrate independence and they’re going to do similar things like that you’re also going to see a very partisan

25:28 press as had existed in the 1790s and into the early 1800s you’re going to see a partisan press where democratic papers are going to be out there campaigning for jackson making the case that jackson should be the winner and he ultimately is is going to win in 1828 and this shows a a very real transition in american

25:49 politics so our first most of our first presidents had been the virginia gentry with the exception of john adams and then his son john quincy adams who is really an elite from massachusetts jackson is not a born elite he is someone who rises to greatness rises to power from very

26:10 humble beginnings and that is going to set a new tone for uh who our presidents will be moving forward to a large extent right interesting well we talked about some history and and are there some lessons for us about contentious elections and uh but not only the contentious

26:32 elections but also the the durability of american democracy amidst this contention yeah i think we often lack as a society any sort of historical perspective and so we look at the divisiveness and the ugliness of our politics today and we think this is somehow unique to our

26:53 situation to our moment and the reality is our politics has almost always been divisive that era of good feeling was very short-lived and is not reflective at all of american history as a whole if you look at the politics of the 1790s you see extraordinary divisiveness where

27:14 people who of opposite parties federalists versus democratic republicans walking jefferson said that when they were walking down the streets in philadelphia they would cross streets across the street so they wouldn’t have to you know doff their hats at each other you look at the politics of the late 1790s and you have a sedition act that is being used to go after the political

27:35 opposition because in the 1790s political opponents didn’t see the other party as legitimate the federalists see the democratic republicans as traders to america the democratic republicans see the federalists as traitors to the principles of 1776. the election of 1828 was ugly as ugly as it can get andrew

27:57 jackson’s mother in uh in by according to his opponents was a prostitute his wife was a jackson was seen as a murderer for things that had happened earlier in his military career i mean all the mud that could be slung in 1828 was slung and and party politics in that

28:18 era and in the jacksonian era could be very vicious and violent at polling places the politics of the 1860s was so divisive that it led to civil war and so you can go from election to election and see that the the issues may have changed but the divisiveness and the ugliness was often right at the forefront and so

28:41 that aspect of our elections today is something that’s been with us for a very long time and i i think too you see it you see you see changes in the way elections are held over time as well so that democracy spreads i think one of the one of the results of that election in 1824 is that people are upset by what they

29:01 see as a corrupt bargain and they want to see more of a voice of the common man and so in the lead-up to the election you still have six states that don’t have a popular vote for president by 1840 every state but south carolina is going to have popular vote for president they don’t get rid of it till after the civil war in the lead-up to the election people

29:22 saw again this corrupt bargain as the elites being able to choose who they’re who the nominees are going to be and who the winner is going to be and in the aftermath of the election you begin to have a push towards the people selecting who the candidates are going to be not members of congress not state legislatures but voters in in the

29:42 different states are going to now be delegates to national to state and the national conventions to pick who their candidates are going to be the electoral college becomes democratized where again not only is it that fewer state legislatures are picking the winners but the states decide they’re going to have a winner take all system and that is going to give power to to states and so there are there are

30:05 always going to be crises and then there will be reforms that follow and i think we’ll continue to see that where there will be elections that are sometimes seen as a crisis and then reforms will follow and and democracy has survived the us has survived and i i am hopeful though never certain i’m a historian not a prophet but i’m hopeful that our our system can survive

30:26 even what is seen as a very ugly and divisive election this year i hope so well jonathan white thank you very much for joining us uh we encourage everyone to check out your website at jonathanwhite.org or follow you on twitter at civil war john and that’s john with a j-o-n

30:47 that’s right and uh you can check out our new life liberty and the pursuit of happiness textbook at bill of rights institute.org thank you very much for joining us thank you you