Lacking the passion and intensity of previous presidential campaigns such as those that occurred in 1800, 1824, and 1828, the Campaign of 1832 nonetheless played a crucial role in ensuring that organized, permanent political parties would become a fixture of American politics and an inseparable element of American political culture. And even though the Campaign of 1832 was not as provocative or as dramatic as those other elections mentioned above, it was not entirely without drama, for it is hard to conceive of any political contest involving personalities such as Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician,” as just any ordinary affair. In this case, the drama that did arise was of a more personal nature, and one that serves as an important reminder about those facets of political life that are driven by emotion, sensitivity, empathy, antipathy, and loyalty.
By and large, President Andrew Jackson’s first term has been described largely as one that solidified the position of what was by now commonly referred to as the Democratic Party (an outgrowth of the Jeffersonian Republicans, initially called simply “Republicans” and later referred to as “Democratic-Republicans,” the direct progenitors of the Democrats, also known by some in the previous election as the “Jackson Party”). Jackson’s administration was not without controversy and serious opposition, but for the most part, his first term as president had been successful, and thus his party’s renomination was a fait accompli. And so, in late May 1832, the Democrats, holding their first national nominating convention in Baltimore, endorsed nominations that Jackson had previously secured in state conventions, the national nominating convention still an emergent force in presidential politics and thus still deferential to the state parties. Jackson’s renomination was unopposed, but the vice presidency was now in play, a development that was incongruent with what had previously been anticipated shortly after Jackson’s election in 1828. At that time, John Calhoun was moving into his second term as vice president, having already served under President John Quincy Adams, and at that time he was the popular choice to remain in office and thus serve under Jackson as well. Due to policy disagreements with then-president Adams, who was firmly committed to the comparatively activist government promoted by Henry Clay’s “American System” (which was itself a revival of the policies of Alexander Hamilton), Calhoun’s allegiances switched to the Jacksonians, who appeared at the time to be more inclined to support localized and limited governance. During his campaign for reelection to the vice presidency in 1828, Calhoun appeared to everyone as the obvious heir apparent, brimming with presidential potential and well situated to press for the office upon Jackson’s departure. Indeed, Calhoun’s name had been floated for a run for the presidency in the lead-up to the 1828 election, but in the end he withdrew from consideration. In 1829, it was not clear that the newly elected President Jackson would even be interested in running for a second term; thus, many were already considering Calhoun as the inevitable candidate in 1832. But very early in Jackson’s administration, Calhoun found himself in a private conflict with the president, one that, when combined with real political differences that were becoming more apparent, would drive a rift between these two strong personalities and, in the end, not only diminish Calhoun’s chances of becoming the next president, but actually ruin his tenure as vice president and guarantee that the nomination for the second spot on the ticket in 1832 would go to another rising star.
Much of what occurred was of an emotionally charged personal nature stemming from a nasty feud between Calhoun’s wife, Floride, and Margaret “Peggy” Eaton, the wife of President Jackson’s friend and secretary of war John Henry Eaton, former senator from Tennessee (for which, it turns out, he was constitutionally unqualified, at least initially, as he was first appointed to the Senate in 1818 while two years underage). When Jackson appointed Eaton to his cabinet, the Calhouns were caught off guard and set on the defensive. Eaton was, as it turned out, a stern critic and rival of Calhoun—even having opposed Calhoun’s candidacy for the vice presidency; and his presence on the cabinet was an obvious impediment to the vice president’s own ambitions, as he had hoped to use the vice presidency to become Jackson’s most influential adviser and further secure his ascendency to the still higher office of the presidency in either 1832 or 1836. With Eaton on the cabinet, Calhoun suspected that his influence would be diluted, suspicions that were confirmed quite early in Jackson’s administration, as Eaton proved to hold more sway with the president in promoting appointments for his friends while simultaneously impinging upon Calhoun’s dwindling influence to do the same. Calhoun did manage to land cabinet positions for three of his friends (in a cabinet of six members, a not-so-inconsiderable number when Calhoun’s voice was also added), but he nonetheless perceived the strength of his influence to have been sufficiently compromised by the unwelcome ascent of Eaton.
To make matters worse for Calhoun, another prominent figure, New York’s Martin Van Buren, was tapped by Jackson for secretary of state, and Van Buren—the rising star alluded to above—was also widely regarded as promising presidential material and thus a still more formidable rival and potential impediment to Calhoun’s expansive ambitions. With the darkening presence of both Eaton and Van Buren, Calhoun feared that what had once seemed to have been the brightest and surest of futures was now utterly in jeopardy. Thus the Calhouns, husband and wife, together went on the offensive, and for them it was undeniably personal.
Peggy Eaton was the soft target in the Calhouns’ crosshairs. She was in her second marriage, her first husband, John Timberlake, having committed suicide as a consequence of what many alleged, proof or lack of proof notwithstanding, to have been illicit behavior between Peggy and John Eaton. After Timberlake’s death, Eaton married the young widow with Jackson’s full support and blessing. This caused considerable distress within Washington society owing to the rumors of marital impropriety, and in particular, among many members of the cabinet and their wives. Floride Calhoun in particular was offended by Peggy Eaton’s past, or at least what was taken to be true about that past, and thus she led a faction of influential Washington wives in a successful collective snub of Mrs. Eaton. The president, whose own late wife, Rachel Donelson Jackson, had also been socially ostracized because of malicious rumors, was sensitive to this kind of treatment; he became intensely defensive of Mrs. Eaton and angry with those cabinet members, and especially with his vice president, for participating in such untoward pettiness. Even worse for both the president and the Eatons, Jackson’s own niece, Emily Donelson, standing in for his late wife as a substitute First Lady, was allied with Floride Calhoun and had thus also refused to call upon Mrs. Eaton, confining her interactions with the Eatons only to her duties as White House hostess. Meanwhile, Calhoun’s pettiness toward Jackson himself further angered the president against him. Van Buren, the Little Magician of political lore, took every opportunity to extend courtesy and sympathy to the Eatons, actions that did not go unnoticed by Jackson and his allies. While the meanness of this affair was not the only cause of the Jackson-Calhoun rift, it was an important factor in the deterioration of both their personal and professional relationships. The Eaton Affair, also known by some as the “Petticoat Affair,” directly led to the formation of President Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” or his group of unseen, unofficial advisers that he now increasingly relied upon due to this estrangement from his appointed cabinet, or “Parlor Cabinet.” Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet consisted of his most trustworthy political advisers and provided him with a body of friends with whom he could consult without having to suffer further irritation from the pettiness of his formal cabinet. Ultimately, the president fired a number of members of the official, appointed cabinet. Secretary of State Van Buren would also resign of his own volition from the cabinet but would remain an important participant in Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, and would soon receive an appointment by the president to serve as ambassador to Great Britain at the Court of St. James.
The Eaton Affair was but one reason for the sudden decline of Calhoun’s influence and prospects. Calhoun, who had once been a nationalist and war hawk prior to and during the War of 1812, had by his second term as vice president moved toward a position stridently advocating states’ rights, one that was grounded in his “doctrine of nullification,” which argued that states had the right to nullify federal laws within its own borders. A talented writer and proficient orator, Calhoun had fervently defended and helped to further develop the principle of nullification through his own writings and speeches—a doctrine that he combined with his theory of “concurrent majorities” to challenge the strength of the Northern section as well as the nationalism that he had once so successfully helped to promote. Nullification was advanced within the context of actual policy, the Tariff of 1828, a protectionist measure enacted by Congress, during the last full year of the Adams administration, aimed at supporting and strengthening domestic industry vis-à-vis foreign imports. With mixed results in the end, the legislation was meant to have benefited northern manufacturing economies, but it was perceived by Southerners as inimical to their own decidedly agrarian interests. Calhoun’s home state of South Carolina, in particular, had been agitated by what was called, from their point of view, the “Tariff of Abominations,” and with the argument of nullification now in play, a secessionist crisis was under way.
For his part, while Jackson certainly embraced states’ rights in the spirit of Jeffersonian republicanism, he did so only to a point, finding the very notion of nullification to be treasonous. For Jackson, as for others such as his contemporary Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, the Union was indissoluble, and to think and argue otherwise set a perilous course. Famously, the president exhibited his differences with the vice president at a Democratic commemoration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, where, in a toast to Jefferson, he raised his glass and, targeting his imposing gaze directly at Calhoun, forcefully declaimed, “Our Federal Union. It must be preserved.” Undaunted, Calhoun raised his glass in an equally famous reply, “The Union, next to our liberty, most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.” Calhoun continued to even more aggressively espouse the nullification doctrine, and the government of his home state of South Carolina grew utterly recalcitrant; but with forceful determination, President Jackson made clear to South Carolina his willingness to even go so far as to send federal troops to enforce the tariff law. Given the president’s reputation, this was a prospect not to be taken lightly; thus South Carolina would eventually back down, but not until after the doctrinal positions had been clarified and the sectional allegiances further crystallized and polarized. It was the first major secession crisis since the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812, and one that actually came closer to occurring and that signaled those unbridgeable divisions that remind us today that it would not be the last.
As if this were not enough, the final nail against Calhoun’s incumbent vice presidency and his hope of inheriting the presidency from Jackson was delivered by the revelation that Calhoun had struck at Jackson much earlier in their respective careers. In opposing then-general Jackson’s 1819 military expedition against the Seminoles in Florida during the Monroe administration, Calhoun, who was at that time serving President Monroe as secretary of war, had recommended that the president’s cabinet collectively censure Jackson’s conduct in Florida, with the further recommendation that punitive measures follow. Had it not been for the persuasive support of Jackson by another Monroe cabinet member and unforeseen political rival of Jackson, then-secretary of state John Quincy Adams, Calhoun likely would have won President Monroe over to his position. Jackson thus would have been censured and his political future dimmed by the young war hawk from South Carolina. It was Adams, whom Jackson so bitterly challenged in 1828, who actually protected him from Calhoun, the man who would become his own vice president and one of his most disdained rivals.
As it was, the censure never came, and Calhoun’s push for it had remained unknown to Jackson until it came to light during this particularly tense moment between the two men; indeed, Jackson had always assumed, mistakenly, that Calhoun had defended his actions in Florida. The revelation as to the facts of the case came from William Crawford of Georgia, a candidate for the presidency in 1824 and who in 1830 exposed Calhoun’s previous actions against Old Hickory. With this, the impasse led to a complete break, and an immediate confrontation between the president and vice president ensued. When Van Buren’s appointment to the Court of St. James came before the Senate for confirmation, the vote was deadlocked, giving Vice President Calhoun, serving in his constitutional capacity as president of the Senate, the deciding vote. Calhoun promptly used that vote to break the tie and reject Van Buren, a move that Jackson found “base, hypocritical and unprincipled,” and he referred to Calhoun as nothing less than a villain. His position in the administration now utterly destroyed, Calhoun resigned the vice presidency, an office that he had held since 1825, becoming the first of two vice presidents to resign from that office in American history (remember that he is also the first of two vice presidents to serve under two different presidents). Devoting his political energies to successfully obtaining a seat in the Senate, Calhoun would shake off this setback and continue on as one of the more important statesmen of his era, a member of what some historians call, owing to their exalted level of shared preeminence in Congress, the “Great Triumvirate”: John C. Calhoun; Henry Clay, known as the Great Compromiser; and Daniel Webster. With Calhoun detached from Jackson, the party eagerly turned to Van Buren for the vice presidency in the upcoming campaign of 1832.
As important as this rift with Calhoun was for Jackson’s administration and for the shape of the Democratic ticket in 1832 and the future leadership of the party for the next decade, an even more significant political issue commanded the attention of the electorate—that of the second national bank. Encouraged by Jackson’s political opponents, most prominently Clay—who was at that time serving as the senator from Kentucky—Nicholas Biddle, an influential Pennsylvania financier, currently the president of the Second Bank of the United States, and thus by default President Jackson’s sworn nemesis, petitioned Congress for an early renewal of the bank’s charter, which reflexively incurred Jackson’s ire. After a protracted congressional debate, both chambers of Congress approved the renewal of the national bank; this played into the hands of Clay and his allies, who were hoping to provoke Jackson into opposing the institution, a move that they knew would not require very much effort, given the president’s abiding rancor toward the bank.
Owing to Jackson’s personal experience as a young man involving financial losses incurred from unpaid promissory notes that were connected to land speculation in Tennessee, Jackson predictably reacted to the renewal of the bank charter as a personal affront. Previous loose lending practices practiced by Tennessee banks had helped to fuel a real estate bubble, and when the bubble burst, it ruined the lives of many Tennessee residents. Hence Jackson, who had himself directly suffered from the actions of the banks in Tennessee, harbored an intractable animosity toward banks in general and anything to do with the centralized banking systems. During his administration, he vigorously sought to dismantle once and for all the national bank that had been established, at the behest of Alexander Hamilton, during the Washington administration. On this issue, Jackson was more in line with the states’ rights position, for he saw a national bank as unconstitutional and sought to reconfigure the banking system more in accord with the decentralized structures of the states themselves. Jackson also opposed easy credit and paper currency, and stated that “hard money,” or “specie,” was the only reputable medium of exchange in any context. Naturally, he distrusted speculators and viewed the Hamiltonian economic policies of Clay’s “American System” askance. In Jackson’s mind, banks and their “rag money,” flimsy notes, and cheap credit were nothing less than despicable, and the more powerful the bank, the more it was to be a target for demolition, and the national bank was just such a bank.
Determined to eradicate the bank, the president eagerly vetoed the bill to renew the bank’s charter in 1832. In a famous veto message, Jackson observed that the bank primarily served the interests of the wealthy, and he warned the nation against the designs of the rich who sought to convert their economic fortunes into expanded political influence throughout the country, to the detriment of republican ideals. Institutions such as the national bank served, according to Jackson, to “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” In stifling the bank’s charter, Jackson further clarified what were for him and his allies the now firm political boundaries of American democracy: the party of the people, the Democratic Party, was to slay the dragon bank once and for all; their opponents, on the other hand, were no less than plutocrats who kept their real interests obscured behind the bank’s established reputation, seeking ways to secure and expand their position, all at the expense of the common man. Biddle was not impressed by any of this, and openly, unflinchingly scolded the president for what he perceived to be a cynical manipulation of the “Great Unwashed” for his own political gain.
It was left to the opposition party, still referred to as the National Republicans, to challenge this claim by the Democrats—viz., that Jackson and his party were the party of the common citizens, the people themselves. The National Republican Party held its nominating convention in December 1831. Made up primarily of businessmen, industrialists, small merchants, and some farmers, they looked to the venerable Clay to defeat Jackson and thereby secure the reestablishment of a new national bank, along with strengthening support for protective tariffs and increased federal expenditures on internal improvements. A former congressman and stalwart of Clay’s “American System,” John Sergeant of Pennsylvania, was selected to accompany Clay as his running mate. The strategy of the National Republicans and their candidate Clay hinged on persuading the electorate that Jackson, far from being a vaunted man of the people, had actually turned despotic, intent upon destroying the nation’s democratic institutions and assuming absolute power. In effect, both sides insisted throughout the campaign that their opponents were antidemocratic autocrats, especially when the polemic turned to the bank issue. National Republicans blamed Jackson for introducing corrupt patronage practices, or what would become known as the “spoils system” (following the expression “To the victor belong the spoils”) into American politics, a charge they felt was damning evidence of Jackson’s true colors as an antidemocrat and a self-serving tyrant. The charge seemed to stick, as President Jackson’s administration is to this day often associated, rightly or wrongly, with the practices and problems of the “spoils system,” although it must be admitted that such practices were pervasive and even expected at the time, the president being no different from any other holder of high office in the 1830s, at least in this regard.
Far more serious than political patronage, representations of the specter of tyranny abounded throughout the election on both sides. Opponents of the national bank (primarily Jackson’s Democrats) accused bank president Biddle of imperious conduct, calling him “Emperor Nicholas” or “Czar Nick,” or even “Old Nick,” an unsubtle (at the time) allusion to the Devil. Jackson’s opponents followed suit, referring to the president as “King Andrew I” (an amusing reversal of insults by Jackson’s supporters in the election of 1828, who had unkindly referred to then-president Adams as “King John II”), or simply the Tyrant or Usurper, a “King of Kings” (an allusion to the exalted emperors of ancient Persia, and not to another, very different figure also so named) who was bent on destroying the Constitution. In the wake of the bank veto, Daniel Webster accused Jackson of emulating King Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, even to the point of identifying the famous claim of the Bourbon monarch, “I am the State” (“L’etat c’est Moi”) with Jackson’s alleged lust for power. This message was driven by the desire to expose Jackson as a false man of the people who in reality sought office for the sake of power alone, “The King Upon the Throne, the People in the Dust!” as one anti-Jackson paper couched the charges of autocracy, charges that inspired several early political cartoonists to depict Jackson as a cheap, grasping despot. One cartoon depicts a fawning Van Buren crowning Jackson while a scepter is presented to the new King Andrew by none other than the Devil himself; another drew Jackson as a displaced Quixote, tilting against the marbled columns of the national bank only to shatter his lance in folly. In turn, supporters of Jackson made effective use of political cartoons to lampoon Henry Clay and to attack the national bank, and to their benefit, as the National Republicans miscalculated in their fixation on the president’s bank veto. The National Republicans also misfired in their attempts to redefine Jackson as a despot. For example, political cartoons of the 1830s made frequent use of rats to symbolize corruption, quite frequently the corruption associated with the national bank, and it was not unusual to see cartoons depicting Jackson as a cat chasing down rats, cleaning out the vermin. Instead of politically hurting the president, his veto of the national bank bill ultimately reinforced his image as the protector of the common man and the enemy of the rich and powerful. President Jackson successfully seized the opportunity to frame his entire campaign around the national bank issue. Thus his decision to run on a populist platform hit a responsive chord with a rapidly expanding and engaged electorate.
The Democrats made good use of popular events—especially the barbecue and the parade. By some accounts, these parades were elaborate affairs, some reported to have extended a mile in length, involving torchlight, numerous and colorful banners, celebratory portraits of Jackson displayed alongside Washington and Jefferson, and the return of the familiar and effective hickory tree symbols that were ubiquitous in the previous election, honoring the president’s nickname of “Old Hickory,” won through his military discipline. National Republicans also held large rallies; one such rally in Philadelphia was reported to number around ten thousand Clay supporters, mostly naturalized citizens of Irish descent. But the Democrats appear to have been, by comparison, more effective in organizing rallies, while the National Republicans seem to have mastered the craft of the political cartoon. Jackson, Van Buren, and hickory poles were the more popular targets for lampooning cartoonists sympathetic to the National Republican cause.
Interestingly, a third party showed some support during the campaign of 1832, one that has often been referred to as actually having introduced the formal political party as a national institution wholly independent of governmental institutions and allegiances. In response to a bizarre series of events involving allegations against Masons in the state of New York, the new Anti-Masonic Party formed in the late 1820s and formally entered the presidential campaign stage in 1832. Anti-Masonic sentiment traced its roots to the 1826 unsolved abduction of William Morgan of Batavia, New York. Morgan’s unexplained disappearance raised suspicions owing to his plans to publish a book that he claimed would detail the allegedly sinister side of the Masonic organization. (Evidence connecting the disappearance of Morgan to anyone involved in Freemasonry was never found.) In the aftermath of Morgan’s disappearance, anti-Masonic candidates began to run for office in New York and other states, leading to the formation of a formal Anti-Masonic Party, which held what some argue was the first truly and self-defined national political convention in American history, meeting in Baltimore in 1831, well before the first truly national conventions of both the Democrats and the National Republicans. The following year, the Anti-Masons nominated Maryland’s William Wirt for president of the United States. Wirt, a former U.S. attorney general of notable renown as well as a prosecutor in the trial against Aaron Burr, was himself a former Mason. Amos Ellmaker of Pennsylvania was selected to run as Wirt’s running mate. The party, as its name indicates, was primarily formed to oppose what they believed was the deleterious influence of Freemasonry in American society. But to gain political viability, it embraced policy positions not unlike those of the National Republicans, and for this reason, at least for a limited time, it eclipsed the National Republicans within the state of New York. By and large, while the Anti-Masonic Party serves as an interesting example an early challenge to the emerging two-party system, it was unable to muster the kind of broad appeal needed to sustain a national base.
Election Day vindicated President Jackson’s first term, in spite of all the turmoil over protective tariffs (provoking a secessionist crisis), the banking system (stirring the populist pot), and the Peggy Eaton situation (shedding an unflattering light on the influence of scandalmongering, and those willing to engage in it, within the nation’s capital). Accounts vary, but it appears that the president won between around 687,500 and 702,000 votes (at least 55% of those cast—what would be regarded as a landslide today), while his opponents (Clay and Wirt) together won around 474,000–530,000 votes. In some states, votes for Clay and Wirt were counted together on ballots simply marked “anti-Jackson,” thus leading to our present confusion over just how many popular votes Clay was able to secure (although some records suggest that Wirt managed to collect close to 100,000 votes, which would have been a substantial reduction of Clay’s total if accurate, and not a bad showing for a third-party candidate in the 1830s). But as we all know, the real votes are, then as now, in the Electoral College; and there, President Jackson won a truly significant victory, taking 219 votes to Clay’s 49—a genuine landslide of 76 percent of the Electoral College for the president. Wirt won just seven electoral votes from Vermont, giving him the Green Mountain State. Eleven South Carolina Democrats, no doubt influenced by Calhoun, broke from the national party and cast their electoral votes for Virginia governor John Floyd, a proponent of Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification and actually running under the banner of the Calhoun-inspired “Nullifier Party,” based almost exclusively in South Carolina. Other than Vermont and South Carolina, which went to Wirt and Floyd, respectively, and the six states won by Clay—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and the Great Compromiser’s home state of Kentucky—Jackson took the rest of the Union, sixteen states in all. The president won over 60 percent of the popular vote in nine states, some of which reported an astonishing100 percent for Jackson. Clay’s best showings were in Connecticut and, as expected, Kentucky, but in neither state did he win more than 55 percent. Predictably, the vice presidency went to Jackson’s new running mate, Van Buren, who received 189 electoral votes, the remainder cast for Sergeant (matching Clay’s total for president), 30 electoral votes from Pennsylvania for favorite son William Wilkins, 11 for Henry Lee from South Carolina (although unlike Floyd, Lee was not a nullifier), and 7 for Ellmaker to match Wirt’s total.
All told, Jackson’s victory solidified the Democratic Party as the dominant political voice in American politics, a strengthening voice that commanded diverse and wide-ranging appeal throughout the electorate, given its ability to more convincingly convey the image of being the real party of the people. It was apparent to the National Republicans that further victories were in the Democratic Party’s future unless they could somehow provide a credible challenge to that image.
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