CALHOUN BORROWED TROUBLE with Jackson by his criticism. But it was a long-term debt. In the moment, in correspondence with the general, Calhoun gave no clue of what he was saying behind the closed doors of the cabinet. Jackson, far from suspecting Calhoun, thought the war secretary was defending him. Calhoun would keep his secret from Jackson for more than a decade.
Meanwhile there was politics to tend to. Presidential elections had grown decreasingly competitive since 1800. Each succession had been an anointing, each reelection a waltz. But 1824 promised to be different. For the first time the country would choose a president who had not taken an adult part in the American Revolution. William Crawford was the favorite of the congressional Republican caucus, which had chosen the party’s previous candidates. Yet the caucus now wielded less power than in those earlier elections. The spirit of democracy was catching hold in America. In the days of George Washington, the electorate was quite small; women and nonwhites generally couldn’t vote, and even among white men, property and residency requirements restricted the franchise to the wealthy and rooted. But the electorate expanded with the emergence of the West, where new states lured settlers with the promise of easy voting rights. The old states countered by reducing their restrictions, lest they lose residents to the frontier democracies. By the 1820s nearly all white men could vote.
And though they still didn’t vote directly for presidential candidates, they voted more often for the presidential electors than before, as state legislatures relinquished that prerogative. Presidential elections became popularity contests, with the most successful candidates being those who touched a chord in the ordinary farmers, mechanics and crossroads merchants who increasingly held president-making power. When the founding generation of Americans had made George Washington president, no one asked him to be a man of the people. But when Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, Henry Clay and John Calhoun jockeyed for position in 1824, being a man of the people—or appearing to be—was a political prerequisite.
THE CAMPAIGN COMMENCED early. Some observers dated the start to the beginning of Monroe’s presidency, in maneuverings within the cabinet. But the politicking remained intramural until Monroe’s second term, when the several hopefuls made their candidacies known. Jackson was nominated by unofficial bodies of Republicans in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. The general declined to accept the nomination, but he also declined to refuse it. He adopted the position that he would not seek the presidency, but if the people called him to serve, he would answer the call as he had answered the call to military service.
The administration insiders—Crawford, Adams and Calhoun—signaled their availability to backers in various states, who then campaigned on their behalf. Crawford appeared to have the advantage. The longtime treasury secretary had employed the patronage that came with his office to build a network of loyalists. Yet the ranks of his friends were almost equaled by the ranks of his enemies. Some disliked him personally; his prickly temperament had involved him in multiple duels. In one he killed his antagonist; in another he caught a bullet in his wrist that disabled his hand for many months. More than a few Crawford skeptics perceived corruption in the patronage he conferred on his favorites. At times the other candidates presented themselves as the best placed to block Crawford, and their appeals drew support. But the Georgian cast himself as the candidate of the South, and with the apparent lapse of the Virginia dynasty of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, much of the South responded positively.
Adams ran directly against Crawford, on a comparably regional basis. The South was the most coherently influential region of the country, but New England came a close second, and many in New England and elsewhere judged that America had had enough of Southern presidents. Who better to break the Southern hold than the son of the only non-Southern president so far? Adams was his own worst enemy in the contest for support among politicos in the various states; his patent self-righteousness put people off. Yet he was capable and experienced, and he gradually gained momentum.
Calhoun was the Hamlet of the bunch. Egregious ambition was held against any candidate; it was the chief complaint against Crawford. But Calhoun erred in the other direction. Some days he actively sought the presidency, by conversation and correspondence; other days he seemed not to care. His was the most cerebral of the campaigns; his arguments for himself, like his arguments for the nation-building agenda he shared with Clay, clicked into place logically and securely. But they didn’t inspire people. This was a serious handicap, for in the emerging age of democracy, people wanted to be inspired.
OF THE CHIEF contenders, Henry Clay ran the campaign that one day would seem the most modern, for he actually gave speeches on his own behalf. Andrew Jackson’s call-to-duty diffidence was but a slightly exaggerated version of what was expected of candidates generally. The presidency was a gift of the people, bestowed on whom the people chose. Potential recipients were supposed to sit quietly and wait until the gift was bestowed on them. Everyone understood that this was a fiction; candidates were allowed, indeed expected, to work behind the scenes to win the top job in American politics. But the work had to be invisible, or at any rate easily overlooked. Speeches on behalf of oneself were almost disqualifying offenses.
Clay, however, was a member of Congress, having returned to the House in 1823, and been reelected speaker, after stabilizing his finances at home. Crawford, Adams and Calhoun were not members. Jackson had been sent to the Senate by Tennessee in 1823, but he was no orator and didn’t pretend to be one. Clay was accounted one of the two best orators on Capitol Hill, the other being Daniel Webster and the order depending on listeners’ tastes. Clay actively joined debates in the House, and while his remarks involved issues before the chamber, they simultaneously served as campaign speeches.
In January 1824 he resumed his nation-building efforts. The national bank was up and running, though its reputation had suffered a setback in the financial panic. It had received the blessing of John Marshall and the Supreme Court, and its charter wouldn’t have to be renewed for another decade. Clay devoted little breath to its necessity and virtues. But the other elements of his three-part program—internal improvements and tariff protection—gave him plenty to talk about. Opinions on the former, Clay asserted, were essentially judgments about the meaning and destiny of the republic. Opponents of improvements, men who argued that the national government couldn’t or shouldn’t take responsibility for the roads and canals that would knit the country together, were ill-begotten sons of the Articles of Confederation, the failed system thankfully supplanted by the Constitution of 1787. “This is the characteristic difference between the two systems of government, of which we should never lose sight,” Clay told the House. “Interpreted in the one way”—that of the Articles—“we shall relapse into the feebleness and debility of the old confederacy. In the other, we shall escape from its evils and fulfill the great purposes which the enlightened framers of the existing Constitution intended to effectuate.”
Clay endorsed tariff protection as the sole way to lead the country out of its lingering lethargy and establish prosperity on a sound footing. “Two classes of politicians divide the country,” he said. “According to the system of one, the produce of foreign industry should be subjected to no other impost than such as may be necessary to provide a public revenue.” The second class perceived a higher and more beneficial role for tariffs. “They would so adjust and arrange the duties on foreign fabrics”—the topic then before the House—“as to afford a gradual but adequate protection to American industry and lessen our dependence on foreign nations by securing a certain, and ultimately a cheaper and better, supply of our own wants from our abundant resources.” The lack of an enlightened tariff policy was the cause of the continuing distress of the country, Clay said. America had allowed itself to grow dependent on foreign suppliers. The British government, at the behest of British private interests, targeted American markets with precise and telling effect. The American government, by its low-tariff policy, had abetted Britain’s offensive. Such folly must cease and be reversed.
In this speech Clay introduced his patriotic label for his program. “Are we doomed to behold our industry languish and decay yet more and more?” he asked. By no means. “There is a remedy, and that remedy consists in modifying our foreign policy and adopting a genuine American system.” Soon Clay was capitalizing “American System.” He elaborated: “We must naturalize the arts”—the industrial arts—“in our country, and we must naturalize them by the only means which the wisdom of nations has yet discovered to be effectual: by adequate protection against the otherwise overwhelming influence of foreigners.” Opponents of protection argued that American industry would arise of itself, if simply left alone. Clay rebutted by contending that American industry was not being left alone. Britain’s predatory policies were the furthest thing from laissez-faire. The American System, as it applied to tariffs, was nothing more than a leveling of the playing field. “The cause is the cause of the country, and it must and will prevail.”
EVEN WHILE GIVING what amounted to campaign speeches from the floor of the House, Clay worked the levers of politics. He talked daily with members of Congress and others in Washington, and he corresponded with leading and useful figures in the states. He did his best to prevent the Republican caucus from choosing the party’s nominee. His objection lay partly in his perception that the caucus smacked of an outdated elitism, and partly in his realization that he wouldn’t be the nominee of the caucus. Not that he admitted disadvantage in any level fight. “My friends are perfectly willing fairly to submit my pretensions, whatever they may be, to a caucus composed of the great body of the Republican party in Congress, or indeed to a caucus composed of all the members of Congress, without reference to party,” he told a New York ally. “They believe that any practical decision to which a caucus, composed in either of those modes, would come must be favorable to me.” But he suspected that the Republican caucus would be unfairly stacked in favor of William Crawford. And so he worked to sabotage it. “There will be none,” he declared encouragingly to his New York friend, speaking of a caucus. “You must discredit all assertions to the contrary.”
He talked down the Crawford candidacy directly. “Be assured that the Crawford interest is in the greatest confusion and despondency,” Clay wrote to a supporter in January 1824. “His partisans continue to assert that there will be a caucus here, but they do not themselves believe it.” Clay had done a head count of Republicans. “There are 181 members against a caucus, 68 for one, and the residue doubtful.” Crawford’s plan was doomed. “There cannot be any caucus here.”
In fact there was a caucus, but it drew only the minority Clay predicted, and its outcome left him hopeful. “The contemplated meeting of Mr. Crawford’s partisans took place last night,” he wrote in February. “The whole week, indeed I may say the session, had been employed by them in the endeavor to collect together as many as possible. Pretensions, threats, coaxing, entreaties were unsparingly used. These conjoint means brought together sixty-six persons!” Predictably they had nominated Crawford, who, Clay contended, had been discredited by their measly numbers. “Mr. Crawford never could have been elected president, but if he ever stood any chance the mere fact of such a nomination, with its train of necessary consequences, must inevitably destroy all his prospects.”
Surveying the field, Clay forecast that no candidate would win a majority of the electors. The race, therefore, would go to the House of Representatives. “You may rely upon it,” he told a Virginia confidant, “that you will have, as your next president, Adams, Jackson or myself. You will have in Virginia to choose between those three evils. It is madness, it is perfect infatuation, to think at this time of any body else.” Clay’s Virginia friend thought Crawford still had a chance. Clay responded that Crawford was too weak in the House. “Mr. Crawford cannot be elected, whoever may be,” Clay said. “If he, Adams and Jackson go into the House, Adams will be elected. If he, Adams and I go into the House, he will still not be elected.”
JOHN CALHOUN’S CAMPAIGN never surmounted his indecisiveness. He positioned himself among Southerners as the anti-Crawford candidate, and to those put off by the whiff of corruption downwind of Crawford, Calhoun seemed an upright alternative. But the Crawford patronage paid off especially in the South, and when the Georgian won the Republican caucus, such as it was, Calhoun’s prospects dimmed.
They darkened further as those of Andrew Jackson improved. Pennsylvania was viewed as an important test. Both Calhoun and Jackson were running outside their home regions, with implications for the countrywide vote. A groundswell for Jackson grew into a tidal wave, and the general carried the state’s convention of Republicans with 124 votes out of 125. At the time it was small comfort to Calhoun that he was the choice of a large majority to be vice president.
Henry Clay read the Pennsylvania results as an obituary to Calhoun’s presidential hopes. “Mr. Calhoun will be dropt in a few days,” Clay predicted. “The course of events in Pennsylvania has rendered that inevitable.” Yet he suspected that Calhoun was already making other plans. “It is rumored that he means to lend his support to General Jackson.”