Andrew Jackson (62 page)

J
ackson’s support indeed
was
the people. When the votes were tallied, he had 154,000 to Adams’s 109,000. Clay and Crawford were nearly tied for third, with about 47,000 apiece. These totals were a minority of voters in the states, as most states still chose electors by legislative decision. But they nonetheless showed clearly that the people preferred Jackson over any other candidate.

Regardless of the popular vote, however, the decision that counted lay with the electoral college. No one knew what the electors would do. Those from states where the people chose the electors felt bound, politically or morally, to follow the wishes of the voters. But what did this mean? Did the majority winner in a state get all the votes of that state or merely a proportion commensurate with the proportion of his majority? And what about the states where the legislators still chose the electors? Were those electors bound, or could they vote their consciences?

Until the electors met in December, no one could answer these questions with confidence. And even after they met, confusion persisted. The credentials of some electors were disputed, leading the president of the Senate, Vice President Daniel Tompkins, to refuse to accept their votes. For two weeks the capital scintillated with reports, rumors, and speculation regarding the outcome of the electoral contest. Papers printed incomplete results, throwing one side or the other into panic. Corrections sent the pendulum careening the opposite way.

Jackson arrived amid the uproar. He came for the new session of the Senate rather than the electoral vote, and this time brought Rachel, who was astonished at the bustle of the capital. “To tell you of this city, I would not do justice to the subject,” she wrote a friend. “The extravagance is in dressing and running to parties. . . . There are no less than fifty to one hundred persons calling in a day.” Some of it was the holiday season, and some the presence of the Marquis de Lafayette, returned to America after all these years. The famous Frenchman was staying at the same hotel as the Jacksons, which afforded Rachel a close view. “He is an extraordinary man. He has a happy talent of knowing those he has once seen. For instance, when we first came to this house, the General said he would go and pay the Marquis the first visit. Both having the same desire, and at the same time, they met on the entry of the stairs. . . . The emotion of revolutionary feeling was aroused in them both. At Charleston, General Jackson saw him on the field of battle; the one a boy of twelve, the Marquis, twenty-three.” That someone scrambled the memory—Jackson never saw Lafayette in battle, though conceivably he saw him passing through Carolina, when Jackson was nine rather than twelve—mattered less than that fate had brought together these two icons of American liberty: Lafayette, a hero of the first war of independence, and Jackson, a veteran of the first war of independence and the hero of the second.

By the middle of December the shape of the electoral vote was finally coming clear. Jackson led, with Adams second. Uncertainty still surrounded the third-place finisher. This was no small matter, in that the Constitution decreed that in the event of failure of any candidate to receive a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives would choose the president from the top three finishers. Everyone assumed that if Clay made it to the House, his long tenure and close alliances there could boost him past Adams and Jackson. But if Crawford nosed out Clay, Jackson would have the edge.

Jackson maintained his composure amid the confusion. “To say I have nothing of concern about the office would be doing injustice to the kind feelings of those who have sustained me, and would wear the appearance of affectation,” he wrote Samuel Swartout, a friend and strong supporter. Yet Jackson was willing to accept any verdict that reflected the honest wishes of the people. “Who shall rule is of less importance than how he may claim to rule. . . . I would rather remain a plain cultivator of the soil, as I am, than to occupy that which is truly the first office in the world, if the voice of the nation was against it.”

This was the politic thing for Jackson to say. It was also easy. By now he wanted to be president; in the contest his combative energies had become engaged. And the popular vote confirmed that he was the choice of the people. For him to lose would be for the people’s will to be ignored, for democracy to be denied.

He had every reason to hope otherwise. The politicians wouldn’t dare overturn the people’s decision. He grew still more confident when the final electoral tally gave him 99 votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. The lion of the House would not be among those considered by the House for president. In the western states that Clay had carried, most voters seemed to rank Jackson second. It was natural to assume that their House delegations would swing to the Jackson column. “The Lord’s will be done,” Jackson said as the year ended, at a moment when the Lord appeared to agree with the American people that Andrew Jackson should be the next president of the United States.

O
n the first day of the new year, John Quincy Adams attended a dinner hosted by members of both houses of Congress, in honor of Lafayette. James Monroe was there, with several other officials of the executive branch and a number of military officers. A cold rain had been falling all day, and with evening it turned to snow. Adams and his wife wished to get home before the roads became dangerously slick, but they had to stay for the toasts. “The President’s Administration was toasted, to which he answered by a brief address of thanks,” Adams recorded in his diary. “General La Fayette answered also very briefly the toast to himself. Mr. Clay made a speech about Bolivar and the cause of South America, and seemed very desirous of eliciting speeches from me and Mr. Calhoun.” Adams resisted, with one eye on the weather and one foot toward the door. But before he could make his escape, Clay approached him. “He told me that he should be glad to have with me soon some confidential conversation upon public affairs.” Clay said nothing more about the subject of the conversation, but Adams was intrigued. “I said I should be happy to have it whenever it might suit his convenience.” And when he got home that night, as he warmed himself by his fire, he wrote, “At the beginning of this year there is in my prospects and anticipations a solemnity and moment never before experienced.”

Clay had commenced the new year in a mood as foul as the weather. Not until the vote from Louisiana had been recorded did he learn that he wasn’t among the trio to be considered by the House. And he had lost in the Louisiana legislature by bad, dumb luck. “Two of my friends in the Legislature were overset in a gig the day before and thereby prevented from attending; two others who were expected did not arrive,” he wrote an associate. That had made all the difference. “
Accident
alone prevented my return to the House of Representatives and, as is generally now believed, my election.”

But if he couldn’t be president, he might yet determine who would be. “You are a looker-on,” he told a friend, “whilst I am compelled to be an actor in the public concerns here. And an actor in such a scene! An alternative made up of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams!” Clay saw little to choose between the two. Clay’s friend had suggested that the speaker might find a place in a new administration. Clay rejected the very thought. “I would not cross Pennsylvania Avenue to be in any office under any Administration which lies before us.”

Yet soon he was crossing more than Pennsylvania Avenue. “Mr. Clay came at six, and spent the evening with me in a long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future,” Adams recorded in his diary on January 9. “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.” Nor were Crawford’s partisans the only ones seeking his favor. “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.” Clay had rebuffed the approaches, wishing to let public passions cool. Unfortunately, they had not, and currently remained as hot as ever. But the hour had come to address Adams directly. “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. In the question to come before the House between General Jackson, Mr. Crawford, and myself, he had no hesitation in saying that his preference would be for me.”

There is no reason to doubt that Clay told Adams just what Adams recorded. Yet only the day before, Clay had written to Francis Blair, a Kentucky editor (who, ironically, would become one of Jackson’s closest advisers), in a rather different tone. “I consider whatever choice we may make will be only a choice of evils,” Clay told Blair. “To both those gentlemen there are strong personal objections.” Clay’s objections to Adams, however, were less than those to Jackson. “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 election of the General would give to the military spirit a stimulus and a confidence that might lead to the most pernicious results. I shall therefore with great regret, on account of the dilemma in which the people have placed us, support Mr. Adams.”

In his meeting the next day with Adams, Clay apparently elided his regret and his belief that the secretary of state was simply the lesser of evils. And after that meeting he changed his story about not wanting an office in the new administration. “I can tell you nothing of the formation of the new Cabinet,” he informed a friend, before adding, “I believe that, if I choose to go into it, I can enter in
any
situation that I may please.” Clay didn’t want his friend to get the wrong idea. “This opinion is formed from circumstances, not from assurances to which I would not listen, but which I should instantly check if attempted to be made.”

Whether or not Clay’s friend got the wrong idea, others did. Or perhaps they got the right idea. Rumors swept through the halls of the Capitol and along the streets of Washington; by the end of the month Clay’s preference for Adams was public knowledge. In a letter to Blair, Clay explained his thinking. “Mr. Adams, you know well, I should never have selected if at liberty to draw from the whole mass of citizens for our President. But 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.” To another associate, Clay articulated more graphically what he saw as the danger from Jackson. “As a friend of liberty, and to the permanence of our institutions, I cannot consent, in the early stage of their existence, by contributing to the election 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.”

In the letter to Blair, Clay followed his explanation of preference for Adams by saying, “I perceive that I am unconsciously writing a sort of defence, which you may possibly think implies guilt.” Clay had reason to feel defensive, for Jackson’s supporters were already alleging a deal between Clay and Adams, with Adams to receive the presidency and Clay a high cabinet office, probably the secretaryship of state. Clay felt obliged to respond. After a Philadelphia paper carried a letter from an unnamed “member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania” likening Clay to Aaron Burr and describing the alleged Clay-Adams bargain as “one of the most disgraceful transactions that ever covered with infamy the Republican ranks,” Clay called the author out. “I pronounce the member, whoever he may be, a base and infamous calumniator, a dastard and a liar; and if he ever dare unveil himself and avow his name I will hold him responsible . . . to all the laws which govern and regulate the conduct of men of honor.”

The complaints of the Jacksonians failed to prevent Adams and Clay from getting what they wanted. The House of Representatives, voting by state delegations, selected Adams to be president over Jackson and Calhoun, by a margin of thirteen to seven to four. “May the blessing of God rest upon the event of this day!” Adams inscribed in his diary.

Jackson accepted the decision with outward calm. He attended a reception hosted by President Monroe for the president-elect. “It was crowded to overflowing,” Adams wrote. “General Jackson was there, and we shook hands. He was altogether placid and courteous.” John Eaton observed the same equanimity in Jackson. “The old man goes quietly on, undisturbed and unmoved by the agitation around. Even enemies speak highly of his course.”

Appearance, in this case, deceived. Privately Jackson was livid. Days after Adams’s victory in the House, the president-elect openly offered the State Department to Clay, who duly accepted. Jackson spat his disgust. “The
Judas
of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver,” he said. “His end will be the same.”