JOHN QUINCY ADAMS thought it would take a great deal more than Whig medicine to cure what ailed America. Adams had never reconciled himself to the habits of democracy, and his pessimism about popular politics increased with his advancing years. The campaign of 1840 seemed evidence that America had lost its mind. “The whole country throughout the Union is in a state of agitation upon the approaching Presidential election such as was never before witnessed,” he wrote in his diary that summer. “Not a week has passed within the last four months without a convocation of thousands of people to hear inflammatory harangues against Martin Van Buren and his administration, by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and all the principal opposition orators in or out of Congress.” Adams received invitations to the campaign events, but declined them as too partisan for his taste. The events proceeded without him. “One of these assemblies was held yesterday by a public dinner given to Caleb Cushing by some of his constituents at Newburyport, and a ball in the evening by him to them. I was invited also there, but did not attend. Mr. Webster and Mr. Saltonstall were there, and a stump-speech scaffold, and, it is said, a procession of six thousand people or more, and a dinner of eighteen hundred. Here is a revolution in the habits and manners of the people. Where will it end? These are party movements, and must in the natural progress of things become antagonistical. These meetings cannot be multiplied in numbers and frequency without resulting in yet deeper tragedies. Their manifest tendency is to civil war.”
The tumultuous politicking continued into the autumn. “This practice of itinerant speech-making has suddenly broken forth in this country to a fearful extent,” Adams recorded. “Electioneering for the presidency has spread its contagion to the president himself, to his now only competitor, to his immediate predecessor, to one at least of his cabinet councilors, the secretary of war, to the ex-candidates Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and to many of the most distinguished members of both houses of Congress. Immense assemblages of the people are held—of twenty, thirty, fifty thousand souls—where the first orators of the nation address the multitude, not one in ten of whom can hear them, on the most exciting topics of the day. As yet, the parties call and hold these meetings separately, and seldom interfere with each other. But at the Baltimore convention last May”—where the Democrats renominated Van Buren—“one of the marshals of the procession, a respectable mechanic of the city, was killed by an attempt of individuals of the opposite party to break it up. At a meeting a few days since, on Long Island, Mr. Webster, in a speech of two hours and a half, observed that there was to be held a meeting of the opposite party—another great meeting—at the same place the next day; and he gave what was equivalent to a challenge to Silas Wright and all the administration leaders to meet him on the stump.” Adams saw nothing good ahead. “The tendency of all this, undoubtedly, is to the corruption of the popular elections, both by violence and fraud.”
The hoopla and uproar eventually produced a win for Harrison. “Mutual gratulation at the downfall of the Jackson–Van Buren administration is the universal theme of conversation,” Adams wrote in the aftermath. “One can scarcely imagine the degree of detestation in which they are both held.” Yet he saw little reason for optimism. “No one knows what is to come. In four years from this time the successor may be equally detested.”
The democracy inaugurated by Andrew Jackson was still working its damage on the American republic, Adams judged. “Jackson’s administration commenced with fairer prospects and an easier career before him than had ever before been presented to any president of the United States. His personal popularity, founded exclusively upon the battle of New Orleans, drove him through his double term, and enabled him to palm upon this nation the sycophant who declared it glory enough to have served under such a chief for his successor.” What had Jackson and Van Buren accomplished? What remained of democracy’s grand promises? Nothing at all. “Their edifice has crumbled into ruin by the mere force of gravity and the wretchedness of their cement.” What would follow? “No halcyon days. One set of unsound principles for another; one man in leading-strings for another. Harrison comes in upon a hurricane; God grant he may not go out upon a wreck!”