A Brief History
On December 1, 1824, it was determined that the vote for the presidential election of 1824 did not have a winner! Andrew Jackson of Tennessee had the most popular votes (151,271) and had won the most electoral votes (99), but a candidate needed to win 131 of the 261 available electoral votes in order to be elected president.
Digging Deeper
The main competition for Jackson, a war hero as well as former governor and senator, known as a man of the people (or a backwoods ruffian, depending on point of view) was a Northern elite, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who received only 113,122 popular votes. Several other men also ran in the election, with two of them, Henry Clay and William Crawford snagging 78 of the precious electoral votes.
If the situation was not goofy enough (as this sort of electoral fiasco had not happened in the previous nine presidential elections), Adams and Jackson were from the same party (that is, Democratic-Republican) and had the same running mate (John C. Calhoun)! Jackson had carried 12 states to Adams’s 7, and the also-rans garnered 5 states between them.
By law, specifically the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the election was sent to the US House of Representatives which finally gave a long awaited election result on February 9, 1825. This election ended the so called “era of good feelings” in which the previous six presidential elections were won by the single major party in the country, the Democratic-Republican Party. The House had elected John Quincy Adams, despite Jackson’s superior performance at the polls (as the popular election was not even close!). Needless to say, Jackson and his supporters cried “foul” and attributed the vote of the House of representatives to corrupt politics.
Jackson and his friends broke off from the parent party and eventually changed the name to just the Democratic Party. Jackson won the 1828 and 1832 presidential elections outright and thus got his vindication. A colorful character indeed, Jackson had killed a man in a duel and was not averse to physically pounding another man that had attacked or insulted him. We put his likeness on our $20 bill which we use today, and in previous years Jackson has also graced the $5, $10, and $10,000 bills, and oddly enough also the Confederate $1,000 bill.
Adams was a 1 term president that lost in his reelection bid to Jackson, but nonetheless had a stellar career in law and politics, also serving as Secretary of State, US Senator, US Representative, and Minister to several different European countries. Adams was a Harvard graduate, even back then a prestigious alma mater. He is also famous for his successful representation to the US Supreme Court of the escaped slaves that had taken over the slave ship, Amistad (in the famous case, US vs. The Amistad, 1841, a case immortalized as a major motion picture). Not surprisingly, Adams was an abolitionist.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Which of these two men would you vote for? Why?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Ratcliffe, Donald. The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race (American Presidential Elections). University Press of Kansas, 2015.
Spielberg, Steven, dir. Amistad. Dreamworks Video, 1999. DVD.
The featured image in this article is a map obtained from an edition of the National Atlas of the United States. Like almost all works of the U.S. federal government, works from the National Atlas are in the public domain in the United States.
You can also watch a video version of this article on YouTube.
