THE MORE CLAY thought about it, the more Jackson’s military background bothered him. At the end of January 1825 he wrote again to Francis Blair, explaining that the Jackson men had turned against him with a vengeance. “I am a deserter from democracy,” he said they were saying of him. “A giant at intrigue. Have sold the West—sold myself—defeating General Jackson’s election to leave open the Western pretensions that I may hereafter fill them myself.” Clay contended that the attacks told much about the attackers. “The knaves cannot comprehend how a man can be honest. They cannot conceive that I should have solemnly interrogated my conscience and asked it to tell me seriously what I ought to do. That it should have enjoined me not to establish the dangerous precedent of elevating, in this early stage of the Republic, a Military Chieftain merely because he has won a great victory.” Blair understood that Clay was referring to the Battle of New Orleans, not Jackson’s plurality in the election. Clay repeated that Adams was hardly ideal. “Mr. Adams, you know well, I should never have selected if at liberty to draw from the whole mass of our citizens for a president.” But Adams was the lesser evil. “There is no danger in his elevation now or in time to come. Not so of his competitor, of whom I cannot believe that killing 2500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult and complicated duties of the chief magistrate.”
Clay liked the phrase “military chieftain” enough to use it in another letter, to Francis Brooke. “As a friend of liberty, and to the permanence of our institutions,” he wrote, “I cannot consent, in this early stage of their existence, by contributing to the elevation of a military chieftain, to give the strongest guaranty that this republic will march in the fatal road which has conducted every other republic to ruin.”
Clay didn’t tell Brooke to publish this letter. Neither did he tell him not to. Two weeks later it appeared in the Washington National Intelligencer. It came to Jackson’s attention shortly thereafter. From that moment Jackson conceived a hatred for Clay he would carry to the end of his life.
Jackson responded with a letter to an ally, expecting him to ensure its publication, as he did. “I am well aware that this term ‘military chieftain’ has, for some time past, been a cant phrase with Mr. Clay and certain of his friends,” Jackson wrote. He professed puzzlement as to what the term was supposed to mean. He acknowledged that he had served as major general of the Tennessee militia and led his troops into battle against Britain. “Does this constitute the character of a ‘military chieftain’?” he asked. He said he had been honored to defend his country at New Orleans, and by the patriotic courage of his soldiers had dealt the British a sound defeat. “If this constitutes me as a ‘military chieftain,’ I am one.” Jackson sneered at Clay for even raising the issue. “Mr. Clay has never yet risked himself for his country. He has never sacrificed his repose nor made an effort to repel an invading foe.” All Clay did was talk—and talk and talk. “Demagogues, I am persuaded, have in times past done more injury to the cause of freedom and the rights of man than ever did a military chieftain.”
JACKSON’S SLAP AT Clay was accompanied by others from Jackson’s supporters. A Philadelphia paper printed an unsigned letter to the editor: “Dear sir: I take up my pen to inform you of one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the Republican ranks….For some time past the friends of Clay have hinted that they, like the Swiss, would fight for those who would pay best. Overtures were said to have been made by the friends of Adams to the friends of Clay, offering him the appointment of secretary of state for his aid to elect Adams. And the friends of Clay gave this information to the friends of Jackson and hinted that if the friends of Jackson would offer the same price they would close with them.” Jackson’s friends had rejected the offer at once, the masked writer said. The writer said he had supposed the Adams group would do the same. “I was of opinion, when I first heard of this transaction, that men professing any honorable principle could not, or would not, be transferred, like the planter does his negroes or the farmer his team and horses.” He had been wrong. “It is now ascertained to a certainty that Henry Clay has transferred his interest to John Quincy Adams. As a consideration of this abandonment of duty to his constituents, it is said and believed, should this unhappy coalition prevail, Clay is to be appointed secretary of state.”
Clay could ignore the whispered slanders of a backroom bargain, but this published libel required a response. He issued a “card”—a paid notice printed in a newspaper—as soon as he read the accusing letter. He said he believed the author to be a member of Pennsylvania’s delegation in the House. He didn’t mention the name George Kremer, a first-term congressman, but rumors already had. Clay offered Kremer an exit. “I believe it to be a forgery,” he said. But should Kremer not disavow the scurrilous sentiments and language, Clay demanded satisfaction. “If it be genuine, I pronounce the member, whoever he may be, a base and infamous calumniator, a dastard and a liar; and if he unveil himself and avow his name I will hold him responsible, as I here admit myself to be, to all the laws which govern and regulate the conduct of men of honor.”
The escalation of charge and rebuttal electrified Washington and rattled the country. Not since the Hamilton-Burr affair had a government official of such eminence as Clay been so close to a duel. The frisson intensified when Kremer published a card of his own, identifying himself and repeating the charge of his first letter. Adopting the third-person construction, he wrote, “George Kremer holds himself ready to prove, to the satisfaction of unprejudiced minds, enough to satisfy them of the accuracy of the statements which are contained in that letter.”
Clay’s friends urged him to reconsider. A duel would demonstrate his bravery, but it wouldn’t disprove the charge of a deal with Adams. He let himself be persuaded to pursue another tack. He called for an investigation by the House. He and Kremer were both members and subject to its discipline. Kremer’s lie had wounded not Henry Clay alone but the House as a whole.
Kremer agreed to the investigation. A special committee was formed, and it invited Kremer to furnish substantiating evidence. He thereupon changed his mind. He denounced the committee and investigation as unconstitutional, and he said he would rely on the American people to determine the truth in the matter.
The committee looked to Clay for guidance. He declared that he took Kremer’s failure to provide evidence as proof that he had no evidence. This was the satisfaction he really wanted. He was willing to let the matter drop.
THE KREMER AFFAIR caused Clay to conclude that the Jacksonians were thinking far ahead. They were fighting not just the present campaign but the next one and the one after that. Nor were the Jackson men alone. “The batteries of some of the friends of every man who would now be president, or who four or eight years hence would be president, are directed against me, with only the exception of those of Mr. Adams,” Clay told Francis Brooke. “Some of the friends of General Jackson, Mr. Crawford, Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clinton”—DeWitt Clinton of New York—“with very different ultimate ends agree for the present to unite in assailing me.” His opponents hoped to accomplish one of two things: to keep him out of the Adams cabinet or to tarnish him if he accepted an Adams offer.
Clay assured Brooke the strategy would fail. “If Mr. Adams is elected, I know not who will be his cabinet. I know not whether I shall be offered a place in it or not. If there should be an offer, I shall decide upon it when it may be made, according to my sense of duty.” But he wouldn’t let his opponents dictate his course. “Most certainly, if an office should be offered to me under the new administration, and I should be induced to think that I ought to accept it, I shall not be deterred from accepting it either by the denunciations of open or secret enemies, or the hypocrisy of pretended friends.”
“MAY THE BLESSING of God rest upon the event of this day!” wrote John Quincy Adams in his diary on February 9. The count of states in the House had yielded thirteen for him, seven for Jackson and four for Crawford. His majority made him the next president of the United States.
Clay reacted differently. “The ‘long agony’ was terminated yesterday, and Mr. Adams was elected on the first ballot,” he wrote to Francis Brooke. “Exertions to defeat or even to delay the result, of the most strenuous kind, were made up to the last moment.” Clay thought the institutions of government had functioned well. “Without referring to the issue of the election, the manner in which the whole scene was exhibited in the House of Representatives was creditable to our institutions and our country.”
The agony of Clay’s friends hadn’t ended, though. Several days later the news still hadn’t reached Kentucky, where John Crittenden feared for Clay’s life. “I have seen the abuse that has been heaped upon you in some of the newspapers, and your card in the Intelligencer,” Crittenden wrote. “I confess that I feel some apprehension for you. There are about you a thousand desperadoes, political and military, following at the heels of leaders and living upon expectations, that would think it a most honorable service to fasten a quarrel upon Mr. Clay and shoot him. And this card of yours, evincing such a spontaneous and uncalculating spirit of gallantry, will be a signal, I fear, for some of these fellows to gather about you and to endeavor to provoke you to some extremity. For God’s sake, be on your guard.”
It was good advice, for the Jacksonians were livid at their hero’s loss, and they blamed Clay. They got help from backers of John Calhoun. During the week after the decision in the House, John Quincy Adams received a visit from a man named Sullivan, who said he had been speaking with friends of Calhoun. Sullivan told Adams what they had said: “That if Mr. Clay should be appointed Secretary of State, a determined opposition to the Administration would be organized from the outset; that the opposition would use the name of General Jackson as its head; that the Administration would be supported only by the New England states—New York being doubtful, the West much divided and strongly favoring Jackson as a Western man, Virginia already in opposition, and all the South decidedly adverse.” The Calhoun men had gone on to name their price for not abetting this sabotage: Calhoun loyalists filling the cabinet, including South Carolinian Joel Poinsett as secretary of state.
“I asked Sullivan with whom he had held these conversations,” Adams recorded. “He said, with Calhoun himself, and with Poinsett.” Adams could hardly believe the boldness of the shakedown. “I told Sullivan that I would some day call on him to testify to these facts in a court of justice.”
Sullivan said Adams surely wouldn’t do that.
“I insisted that I would,” Adams continued, “and told him that I would find it necessary under this threatened opposition of Mr. Calhoun, between him and me; that I had no doubt Mr. Calhoun, in holding this language to him, intended that it should come to me, and that its object was to intimidate me and deter me from the nomination of Mr. Clay.”
Sullivan said that if called to testify, he would refuse to answer.
“I said his refusal to answer would be as good for me as the answer itself,” Adams wrote.
Sullivan said he couldn’t betray a private conversation. He said he had already said too much. Calhoun had enjoined him to say nothing of it to Adams.
Adams let Sullivan off the hook, but he didn’t believe him. “I said this altered the case, and he might consider my declared intention of calling on him to testify publicly to these facts as withdrawn. I nevertheless believed Mr. Calhoun had intended he should report to me his threats of opposition in the event of Mr. Clay’s appointment.”
THE NEXT DAY Adams met with Clay. They spoke for half an hour, and Adams offered him the post of secretary of state. Clay thanked him for the offer and said he would think it over and consult his friends.
Their opinions differed as to whether he should take it. “On the one hand it was said that if I took it, that fact would be treated as conclusive evidence of the imputations which have been made against me,” Clay wrote to Francis Brooke. “On the other hand it was urged that whether I accepted or declined the office, I should not escape severe animadversion; that in the latter contingency, it would be said that the patriotic Mr. Kremer, by an exposure of the corrupt arrangement, had prevented its consummation; that the very object of propagating the calumny would be accomplished; that, conscious of my own purity of intentions, I ought not to give the weight of a feather to Mr. Kremer’s affair.” Clay explained to Brooke that the latter arguments had overcome the former, both among his friends and in himself. Consequently he was accepting Adams’s offer.
NEWS OF THE appointment sent the Jacksonians into a frenzy. A “corrupt bargain,” they called it, repeating the phrase until it admitted of no doubt in their minds as to its veracity or the malevolence of the deed it described.
Jackson himself was equally certain he had been robbed. His grievance against Clay grew. “The Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver,” he said of Clay. “His end will be the same.”