THE WAR OF THE GIANTS: THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1824 AND THE RESHAPING OF AMERICAN POLITICS A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by David P. Callahan December 2017 Examining Committee Members: Andrew Isenberg, Advisory Chair, History Department Jessica Roney, History Department Bryant Simon, History Department David Waldstreicher, External Member, City University of New York Michael G. Hagen, External Reader, Political Science Department ii © Copyright 2017 by David P. Callahan All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Often mischaracterized as a sedate, muddled, and issueless personality contest, the U.S. presidential election of 1824 actually proved an important transitional contest between the First and Second American Party Systems. The five very active candidates involved in the contest created dynamic organizations, sponsored energetic newspaper networks, staged congressional legislative battles, and spread vicious personal attacks against each other, presaging the tactics of the more-celebrated succeeding 1828 election. Four key developments determined the outcome of the 1824 contest. One, the decline of the opposition Federalists encouraged the Republican Party to fracture into five competing candidacies. Two, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun's vicious political attacks fatally undermined the campaign of frontrunner Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. Three, political outsider General Andrew Jackson successfully equated the practice of politics with corruption, capturing a plurality of the popular vote by running against Washington politicians. Four, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' superb insider deal-making ability undergirded his successful effort to win the required House election once no candidate received a majority of electoral votes from the popular election. While adversely affecting the political careers of all the participants except Jackson, the election of 1824 accelerated the ongoing trend toward democratized presidential elections and helped give birth to the Second American Party System. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... iii LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1. THE CRITICAL ELECTION ................................................................................................... 1 2. THE BIG FIVE ......................................................................................................................... 6 3. THE ERA OF BAD FEELINGS ............................................................................................. 34 4. ELECTIONEERING WITHOUT ELECTIONEERING ........................................................ 60 5. ONE-PARTY POLITICS ........................................................................................................ 99 6. THE PERPETUAL CAMPAIGN ......................................................................................... 139 7. THE FINAL BATTLES ........................................................................................................ 189 8. THE WAR WITHIN THE STATES ..................................................................................... 288 9. KINGMAKING BEHIND CLOSED DOORS ..................................................................... 346 EPILOGUE - WINNERS AND LOSERS ................................................................................... 391 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 409 v LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Vote Totals For the Presidential Election Of 1824……………….……….........…….334 2. Vote Totals For The House Election Of 1825………………………….........…..…....377 1 CHAPTER 1: THE CRITICAL ELECTION In an 1820 issue of the Richmond Enquirer, an anonymous editorialist named 'Virginius' surveyed the prospective field of candidates for the next presidential election, still a long four years off, and declared that the voters would be treated to a "War of the Giants." There would indeed be a crowded field of well-known names, all of them Republican Party luminaries, seeking to succeed President James Monroe. Three Cabinet Secretaries, William Crawford, John Quincy Adams, and John C. Calhoun, would compete with the House Speaker Henry Clay and renowned General Andrew Jackson to be elected the sixth President of the United States. The 1824 candidates had been key figures in American politics for at least a decade and many would continue to dominate political history for the next twenty-five years. The outsized and colorful characters involved have frequently encouraged historians to dismiss the presidential election of 1824 as an issueless contest in which largely disinterested voters selected candidates based on personalities. Everett S. Brown's influential 1925 article in the Political Science Quarterly set the tone for much of the subsequent historiography regarding the election. "The basis of the selection of the candidates," Brown insisted, was "personal rather than political."1 In the nearly one-hundred years since Brown's analysis, a more complicated picture of the election fitfully emerged. Localized studies suggested that voters picked candidates based upon their section or regional preferences, or in reaction to some specific political development, such as the heated debate surrounding the Missouri Compromise, the economic anxieties stirred up by the financial Panic of 1819, or the desperate desire for federally-funded internal improvements. Other historians suggested that disgust with the congressional caucus, in which 1 "Virginius," "For the Enquirer," Richmond Enquirer, November 7, 1820, 3; Everett S. Brown, "The Presidential Election of 1824-1825," Political Science Quarterly 40 (Sept. 1925), 384; Marie B. Hecht, John Quincy Adams: A Personal History of an Independent Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 405. In an important recent synthesis of the period, Daniel Walker Howe discounted the presidential election of 1824 as "a clash of personal ambitions," see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2007), 203. 2 elite politicians in Washington picked the Republican Party presidential nominee, or a battle in Congress over reducing military spending profoundly shaped the outcome of the election. At least two historians finally credited the presidential election of 1824 with being far more than Brown's issueless personality contest. M. J. Heale deemed it an important "transitional election" that bridged political cultures from the elitist First Party System to the democratic Second Party Systems. In the first study devoted exclusively to the election of 1824, Donald Ratcliffe determined that the contest contributed novel innovations to presidential campaigning, shaped the role of parties in American politics, and helped determine the ideological contours of the Second Party System. Clearly some sort of order existed behind the confusing "chaos" of an election that featured five prominent candidates all from the same party.2 Regardless of its complexity, the presidential election of 1824 never received the attention lavished on its famous successor election. Historians have suggested that the 1828 contest "vindicated" Andrew Jackson and led to the "birth of modern politics." The political scientist V. O. Key defined a "critical election" as a contest "in which voters are, at least from impressionistic evidence, unusually deeply concerned, in which the extent of electoral involvement is relatively quite high, and in which the decisive results of the voting reveal a sharp 2 Paul C. Nagel, "The Election of 1824: A Reconsideration Based on Newspaper Opinion," The Journal of Southern History, 26 (August 1960), 315-329; Herman Hailperin, "Pro-Jackson Sentiment in Pennsylvania, 1820-1828," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 50 (1926), 193-240; Albert Ray Newsome, The Presidential Election of 1824 in North Carolina (Raleigh: The University of North Carolina Press, 1939); Donald J. Ratcliffe, "The Role of Voters and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio, 1824," The Journal of American History 59 (March 1973), 847-870; Kim T. Phillips, "The Pennsylvania Origins of the Jackson Movement," Political Science Quarterly 91 (Autumn 1976), 489-508; C. Edward Skeen, "Calhoun, Crawford, and the Politics of Retrenchment," The South Carolina Historical Magazine 73 (July 1972), 141-155; Thomas M. Coens, "The Formation of the Jackson Party, 1822-1825" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 2004), 52; M. J. Heale, The Presidential Quest: Candidates and Images in American Political Culture, 1787-1852 (New York: Longman Group Ltd., 1982), 61-62; Donald Ratcliffe, The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824's Five-Horse Race (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 4-5; Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 209. 3 alteration of the pre-existing cleavage within the electorate." For many historians the 1828 contest completely satisfied these criteria, which the 1824 election did not even come close to fulfilling. Adams'