JOHN QUINCY ADAMS considered himself above the intriguing of the other candidates, particularly John Calhoun and William Crawford. “The organization of newspaper support for Mr. Crawford throughout the Union is very extensive, and is managed with much address,” Adams wrote in his diary. “Democracy, Economy and Reform are the watch-words for his recruiting service—Democracy to be used against me, Economy against Calhoun, and Reform against both. Calhoun is organizing a counter-system of newspaper artillery, and his Washington Republican is already working powerfully in his favor. These engines will counteract each other, but I shall be a mark for both sides, and, having no counter-fire upon them, what can happen but that I must fall? This fall may be the happiest event that could befall me, and I but fervently ask that my mind may be disciplined to whatever betide me.”
Adams definitely held himself above the barbarous practice of dueling, and when the tussling between Crawford and Calhoun produced a duel between two of their supporters, he shook his head in disapproving wonder. “This feud has become a sort of historical incident,” he wrote. “It originated in the rivalry between Crawford and Calhoun for the presidential succession; began by some vulgar abuse upon each other in newspapers, in consequence of which Cumming challenged McDuffie before the last session of Congress, and came here last winter during the session to fight him.” William Cumming was a Crawford man from Georgia, George McDuffie a South Carolinian for Calhoun. “The meeting was then postponed to thirty days after the close of the session of Congress, when they met, and McDuffie was shot in the back.” More abuse, threats, challenges and shots followed. “Never was such a burlesque upon duels since the practice existed,” Adams tut-tutted. At least Calhoun had the decency to disapprove, backhandedly. “Calhoun does not talk of it with pleasure, but says Cumming is subject to hereditary insanity from his mother.”
Adams ascribed base motives to Calhoun. When critics of the army and of government spending advocated closing the military academy at West Point, Adams attributed Calhoun’s defense of the institution—an understandable reaction from a secretary of war—to his desire to employ the patronage involved toward his presidential ambitions. When Adams proposed a presidential statement warning the European powers against intervening in the independence struggle of Spain’s Latin American colonies, and James Monroe expressed concern at the reaction of the Europeans, Calhoun fanned the fears of the president and others in the cabinet. “Calhoun stimulates the panic,” Adams wrote. Again and again Adams encountered resistance from Calhoun—“who in all his movements of every kind has an eye to himself,” Adams wrote. Adams eventually inured himself to what he deemed Calhoun’s double-dealing—“the professions of friendship and the acts of insidious hostility”—but it didn’t improve his opinion of the war secretary, and he was happy when Calhoun’s campaign fizzled.
THE CONTEST AMONG the four remaining candidates intensified during the summer of 1824. Momentum favored Andrew Jackson as new voters signaled their preference for the political outsider. William Crawford, the original front-runner, lost even more ground when a cerebral thrombosis laid him low and cast doubt over his future health. John Quincy Adams worked to hold New England. Henry Clay counted on Westerners not smitten by Jackson, on Southern defectors from Crawford, on former Federalists drawn to his American System, and on anyone else he could charm or persuade.
The election took place over several weeks in the fall, with eighteen states letting voters choose the electors and six sticking with legislative selection. The popular tally favored Jackson, with more than 150,000 votes. Adams finished second with somewhat fewer than 115,000. Crawford and Clay together garnered 90,000. These results gave Jackson bragging rights to a plurality of the popular vote but nothing near a majority. Not that it mattered, for the only tally that counted was of the electors. Here again Jackson ran first, with 99 votes, and Adams second with 84. Crawford got 41 and Clay 37.
The final figure—Clay’s 37 electors—was the crucial one. The absence of an electoral majority dictated that the race would go to the House of Representatives. Clay’s failure to edge Crawford for third place meant that Clay would not be a candidate there. The Twelfth Amendment specifies that in the absence of a majority winner in the electoral vote, the top three candidates proceed to a House runoff, in which each state’s delegation casts a single vote. In the House, Clay would have had a good chance of becoming president. Many of Adams’s New England supporters viewed Jackson with incomprehension and alarm; if convinced that Adams couldn’t beat Jackson, they might well have accepted Clay. This now could not happen.
Yet if he couldn’t be king, he might be kingmaker. Clay too eyed Jackson with distrust; he also saw Jackson as a usurper of his title as the champion of the West. The electoral votes hadn’t been officially tallied before Clay began working to keep Jackson out of the White House and get Adams in. His conscience rested easy in his doing so, for he judged Adams more qualified than Jackson to be president. His ambition seconded the decision, for Adams would be a less challenging act to follow in the White House than Jackson. Clay’s hopes of becoming president had been deferred, not eliminated.
Adams’s conscience had to struggle more than Clay’s to justify their alliance. This was partly because Adams’s conscience struggled with most things, but also because Adams had spent much of the previous decade finding fault with Clay. “Clay’s conduct has always been hostile to me, and generally insidious,” he wrote in his diary. “From the time of the Ghent negotiations I have been in the way of his ambitions, and by himself and his subordinates he has done all in his power to put me out of it.” A dispute arose over who had said what at Ghent about an aspect of the negotiations of particular interest to Westerners. Adams blamed Clay for misrepresentation. “Clay’s conduct throughout this affair towards me has been that of an envious rival—a fellow-servant whispering tales into the ear of the common master. He has been seven years circulating this poison against me in the West.”
Yet as the election drew nearer, Adams began to think an accommodation with Clay might be necessary. John Calhoun, upon realizing he had no chance at the presidency, had indicated he would accept the vice presidency. Unspoken was the quid pro quo: that if one of the remaining presidential candidates announced his support for Calhoun as vice president, that candidate would receive Calhoun’s endorsement and likely the votes of Calhoun’s followers. Some of Adams’s backers were suggesting a similar accommodation between Adams and Henry Clay, with the former to become president and the latter secretary of state. Some of Adams’s opponents declared indignantly that the fix was already in: a deal had been struck by an Adams agent, a bargain presumably revealing that Adams, thought to be an ethical exemplar, was as corrupt as the rest. Adams reflected that if he had made such a deal, which he had not, it wouldn’t have been corrupt at all. “Nor is there anything in it unconstitutional, illegal or dishonorable,” he said. “The friends of every one of the candidates have sought to gain strength for their favorite by coalition with the friends of others.”
By the time the electoral vote was known, Adams’s conversion was complete. A Kentucky congressman named Robert Letcher dropped by to sound Adams out. “Letcher wished to know what my sentiments towards Clay were,” Adams recorded. “And I told him without disguise that I harbored no hostility against him; that whatever of difference there had been between us had arisen altogether from him and not from me.”
Letcher responded in a similar soothing vein. “He was sure Clay felt now no hostility to me,” Adams wrote. “He had spoken respectfully of me, and was a man of sincerity.” Yet Adams was able to draw nothing concrete from the conversation. “Letcher did not profess to have any authority from Clay for what he said, and he made no definite propositions. He spoke of his interview with me as altogether confidential.”
Letcher returned a week later. “The object appeared to me to be to convince me of the importance of obtaining an election in the House of Representatives at the first ballot,” Adams wrote in his diary. The last time a race had gone to the House was after the election of 1800, and the machinations then had riven the Republican party. Most Republicans in 1824 wanted to avert a reprise, though some suggested that John Calhoun, who had received a majority of the electors for vice president, favored a standoff that would make him president on March 4, 1825. It was not clear that this would actually happen; the Constitution was vague on the point. But the sober thinkers in the party wished nothing to do with any such scenario, and most favored an early-ballot resolution.
The holiday season had come to the capital, and Adams attended dinners and receptions at which Clay was also present. The two spoke only in passing until, at a New Year’s Day reception at the White House, Robert Letcher asked Adams if he was going back to the state department afterward. Adams said he was. Letcher followed him and said it was time that he—Adams—and Clay should have a conversation. “I told him I would very readily, and whenever it might suit the convenience of Mr. Clay,” Adams wrote.
That evening Adams encountered Clay again, at a dinner in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero and America’s favorite Frenchman. “He told me that he should be glad to have with me soon some confidential conversation upon public affairs,” Adams wrote. “I said I should be happy to have it whenever it might suit his convenience.”
The meeting took place a week later. “Mr. Clay came at six and spent the evening with me in a long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future. He said that the time was drawing near when the choice must be made in the House of Representatives of a president from the three candidates presented by the electoral college; that he had been much urged and solicited with regard to the part in that transaction that he should take, and had not been five minutes landed at his lodgings before he had been applied to by a friend of Mr. Crawford’s, in a manner so gross that it had disgusted him; that some of my friends also, disclaiming, indeed, to have any authority from me, had repeatedly applied to him, directly or indirectly, urging considerations personal to himself as motives to his cause. He had thought it best to reserve for some time his determination to himself: first, to give a decent time for his own funeral solemnities as a candidate; and, secondly, to prepare and predispose all his friends to a state of neutrality between the three candidates who would be before the House, so that they might be free ultimately to take that course which might be most conducive to the public interest.” Enough time had now passed, Clay said. “He wished me, as far as I might think proper, to satisfy him with regard to some principles of great public importance, but without any personal considerations for himself.” Clay stated forthrightly his position on the presidential contest. “Between General Jackson, Mr. Crawford and myself, he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.”
Adams’s diary entry ceases abruptly at this point. He left the remaining half of the page blank, as though he intended to write more. His handwriting was small, and in half a page he could have written much more. In fact he could have written very much more, for the following three pages are blank also. But he never did. Perhaps he became distracted; Henry Clay was not his only visitor during this tense period. Perhaps he decided that the rest of his conversation with Clay was better unrecorded.
CLAY KEPT NO diary. His letters for this period reveal the slow dying of his presidential hopes, which had continued to flicker until the electoral votes were formally counted. He had come very close. One more state—Louisiana, for instance—and he would have edged William Crawford and advanced to the House, where his chances would have been quite good. “Thirty one members out of 58 met and agreed upon a ticket for me,” Clay wrote to a confidant, Peter Porter, regarding the Louisiana legislature, which chose that state’s electors. “Two other friends were expected to arrive before the election. After the meeting, two of my friends went to the country and having got overturned from a gig were unable to attend. The two that were expected did not arrive. Three deserted, in consequence of false rumors; and with all these disadvantages the coalition between Jackson’s friends and Adams’ was only able to carry their joint ticket by 30 to 28.”
Clay put his best face on the result. “I laugh off and bear with unaffected fortitude our defeat,” he told Porter. “We have no reproaches to make ourselves, and it is a source of high satisfaction that my character has not suffered but been elevated by the whole canvass.”
He didn’t take long to decide that Adams would make a better president than Jackson. “What, I should ask, should be the distinguishing characteristic of an American statesman?” he wrote rhetorically in a letter to a New York supporter who had inquired as to his preference between Adams and Jackson. “Should it not be a devotion to civil liberty? Is it then compatible with that principle, to elect a man whose sole recommendation rests on military pretensions? I therefore say to you unequivocally that I can not, consistently with my own principles, support a military man.”
Yet he found himself besieged by the backers of each of the three finalists. “My position in relation to the friends of the three returned candidates is singular enough and often to me very amusing,” he explained to Francis Blair of Kentucky. “In the first place they all believe that my friends have the power of deciding the question, and that I have the power of controlling my friends. Acting upon this supposition in the same hour, I am sometimes touched gently on the shoulder by a friend (for example) of General Jackson, who will thus address me: ‘My dear sir, all our dependence is on you; don’t disappoint us; you know our partiality was for you next to the Hero; and how much we want a western president.’ Immediately after, a friend of Mr. Crawford will accost me: ‘The hopes of the Republican party are concentrated on you. For God’s sake preserve it. If you had been returned instead of Mr. Crawford every man of us would have supported you to the last hour. We consider him and you as the only genuine Republican candidates.’ Next a friend of Mr. Adams comes with tears in his eyes: ‘Mr. Adams has always had the greatest respect for you and admiration for your talents. There is no station to which they are not equal. Most undoubtedly you were the second choice of New England. And I pray you to consider seriously whether the public good and your own future interests do not point most distinctly to the choice which you ought to make.’ ”
Clay told Blair that Adams would be his choice over Jackson. Adams was the safer choice for the country. “The principal difference between them is that in the election of Mr. Adams we shall not by the example inflict any wound upon the character of our institutions; but I should much fear hereafter, if not during the present generation, that the elevation of the general would give to the military spirit a stimulus and a confidence that might lead to the most pernicious results.”
Clay’s friends echoed his concern about the ill effects of a Jackson presidency. “While I respect General Jackson for his military qualifications, I doubt whether he has any political information and experience that fit him for the office,” Peter Porter remarked. “But my great objection to him is that he is by nature a Tyrant. I mean no unworthy imputation, for I believe him to be a man of the purest honor and integrity, but his habits as well as native disposition have always been to consider the law and his own notions of justice as synonymous. As watchful Republicans I should think we were committing, to say the least of it, a great indiscretion in placing the whole military and civil power of the country in such hands.”