by James Traub
The Monroe Doctrine turned out to be more the end of something than the beginning. The era in which a president’s annual message consisted largely of foreign affairs was drawing to a close. The business of building a state equal to the size and energy of the new nation would supplant the preoccupation with Europe, and then the threat of national disunion would supplant that. Monroe was arguably the last foreign policy president until William McKinley or perhaps even Woodrow Wilson. The issues at the heart of the Monroe Doctrine would come fully back into play only at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the United States itself became a colonial force as well as an increasingly intrusive presence in South America.
When that debate resumed, it was not Adams’ balance and self-restraint that galvanized American public opinion but the muscular idealism of Clay and Calhoun. McKinley would justify colonialism in the Philippines as an exercise in moral and political uplift rather than national interest. Wilson would persuade Americans to fight a war in Europe in order to make the world safe for democracy. The Adams voice was too skeptical to appeal to an increasingly self-confident and self-righteous people. Henry Kissinger once wrote that the American people will not accept a “realist” president. But Adams’ warning against reckless adventures abroad has always had important adherents. It may offer more to the American people today than it ever has before.
CHAPTER 21
Who Can Hold a Fire in His Hand by Thinking on the Frosty Caucasus?
(1823–1824)
THE AMERICA OF 1824 WAS RECOGNIZABLY A REPUBLIC, IN THE sense that ultimate sovereignty lay with the people, but much less so a democracy, in which the people engage directly in the political process. Of the twenty-four states, six, including New York, the biggest of them, left the choice of president to the legislature, which chose the state’s presidential electors. In the others, legislators set the terms of the statewide or district-by-district ballot that determined the outcome. While most states had eliminated property qualifications for the franchise, only adult white males, who constituted about 18 percent of the population, were eligible to vote. (A few states gave the franchise to free blacks.) Fewer than 350,000 Americans, out of a population of 11 million, would vote in the election of 1824.
A presidential race was not a popularity contest, as it soon would become; a candidate succeeded by appealing to other professional politicians as much as to ordinary citizens. And the appeal itself remained oblique to the point of coyness. A presidential candidate of 1824 could no more afford to be seen openly campaigning than a candidate for the papacy can today. Instead, candidates had proxies and campaign managers, politely known as “friends.” These gentlemen planted articles in the newspapers advancing their man and undermining rivals, and they engaged in a ceaseless circuit of private talks with legislators and local power brokers. Candidates largely sat in one place and received reports from their friends, in person or by letter. Public addresses, either by candidates or their surrogates, were rare. If there were deals to be made, it was the friends who made them, allowing the aspirant himself to stand loftily above the fray. And as the fortunes of their candidate waxed and waned, these proxies would quietly approach one another proposing to combine forces, with one serving as the designated vice presidential candidate of another. But precisely because the race was so fluid, these offers almost always came to naught.
And yet even as the candidates comported themselves in public according to a code of ethics inherited from the Founding Fathers, the nation’s real political culture had changed radically. Looking back no further than 1812, which was the last time there had been a serious contest for the presidency, the number of states had increased from eighteen to twenty-four; the population of the country had almost doubled, to about eleven million; and the West, where five of the six new states were located, had gained vastly in power. The 1812 contest had pitted a Republican incumbent, James Madison, against a Federalist, DeWitt Clinton; now there would be neither an incumbent nor a party nor even an obvious favorite, since Monroe chose not to indicate one. The 1824 election would thus be a strange hybrid: structurally, or organizationally, it bore the marks of an old-fashioned contest among political elites, but the traditional institutions were now subject to influences from new men and new places. And the collapse of the party system had created a vacuum that would be filled by representatives of regional or economic or cultural interests, all in search of a suitable candidate. For all these reasons, the election of 1824 was the most confused and wide-open national political contest America had ever seen.
As of the fall of 1823, men in the know considered Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford the front-runners. Each were seasoned officeholders; each represented a different region of the country. John C. Calhoun, then forty-two, was thought too young and untested for the highest office. (None of the first five presidents had been less than fifty-seven when taking office.) Indeed, Adams explained to a Calhoun supporter that the South Carolinian would be unable to recruit a cabinet, since “not a single instance had occurred of a person older than the President of the United States accepting Office as Head of Department under him.”
Andrew Jackson was the wild card of the race. He had set his candidacy in motion in the summer of 1822 with his Delphic directive, “Let the people do as seemth good unto them.” That was all it took for Jackson fever to begin to spread across the West. People all over the country knew the legend of Andrew Jackson: he had killed a man in a duel after being shot in the chest, fought alongside Davey Crockett to decimate a force of Red Stick warriors from the Creek tribe, won millions of acres for settlers in treaties imposed on Indian tribes, and annihilated the British force at New Orleans while losing only thirteen men. Newspapers wrote lavish profiles; supporters compared him to “the immortal Washington.” Jackson made an even more elaborate show of indifference to his political destiny than Adams had. He told visitors that he cared for nothing more than the sweet peace of the Hermitage, his Tennessee plantation. To a correspondent from New York who suggested that the state would go for either an Adams-Jackson or a Jackson-Adams ticket, he wrote, as if holding an unpleasant article by his fingertips, “On the subject brought to my consideration by your letter, I have forborne to seek, for the reason of its delicacy.”
Jackson was the first candidate to “run against Washington.” He had the military’s man scorn for the pettiness and haggling of political life, to which he joined an unflagging faith in his own honor. In his letters, which he expected to be reprinted in the press, Jackson harped ceaselessly on the theme that “intrigue, management and corruption” had undermined the nation’s fabric. “Nothing but the virtue of the people,” he wrote, could block the aspirations of Washington’s Machiavellis, “and to them and them alone, I look for a proper stand.” To one of his circle of military boosters, he wrote, “It is now a contest between a few demagogues and the people.” This was both Jackson’s view of the world and his campaign strategy. His backers promoted the idea that since Jackson had been a soldier rather than a politician, he could not be held responsible for political corruption, and since he had never traveled to Europe, he had no taint of Old World moral depravity. Jackson sometimes wrote as if he were, himself, the incarnation of “the people” and its wishes. This, too, may have been a form of demagoguery, but it was a new, democratic form, deeply appealing to the millions of men who disdained the old ways of the long-settled parts of the country.
And yet for all his show of indifference, Jackson was not about to let his campaign be dictated by subordinates. From the safe harbor of the Hermitage he directed his political fortunes with great care. Jackson’s friends, most of them military officers, kept him up-to-date on the status of the other candidates. Jackson, in turn, sent them flattering letters about himself and suggested newspapers in which they should be placed. He authorized John Eaton, his chief aide and counselor, to place a series of anonymous letters extolling his achievements in the Columbian Centinel, a widely circulated newspaper. Eaton a
lso saw to the publication and republication of a campaign biography. To a confidante Jackson tallied the states falling into his column, or so he believed—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi . . .
In the fall of 1823 Jackson agreed, somewhat uneasily, to let the Tennessee state legislature choose him to fill a vacant Senate seat. (He had served briefly in the House and Senate in 1796–1797.) Going to Washington could undermine his own implicit narrative, but it would put him before the public eye and help him lay to rest his image as a bloodthirsty Indian fighter. In early December 1823, the tall, hawk-faced general with the great shock of gray hair arrived in the nation’s capital. He was much in demand socially and spent his first few weeks attending balls at night and reconciling with old rivals during the day. When unprovoked, Jackson was a gracious figure, easy in his sense of command, charming with the ladies. He made an excellent impression. “I am told,” he wrote drily to a military comrade, “the opinion of those whose minds were prepared to see me with a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping knife in the other has greatly changed.”
A few days after Jackson’s arrival, Adams invited him to dinner and there secured his agreement to grace a grand ball at the Adams household celebrating the ninth anniversary of the victory at New Orleans. The great debate over Monroe’s message to Congress was behind him, and Adams was surely thinking about the election to come—though he had done nothing yet to actively seek office. Jackson was obviously his rival. Adams may have been trying to identify himself in the public mind with the great war hero, but the fact is that his admiration for Jackson remained undimmed. Several months later, a friend would ask him whom he thought his supporters would choose were he to be knocked from the race. “Jackson,” said Adams. Wouldn’t that help Jackson gain the presidency? Yes, said Adams. “But what then? My friends would vote him on correct principles. His fitness for the place.”
Louisa sent out five hundred invitations for the ball. She took the doors off the main rooms of the F Street townhouse and had pillars installed in the lower rooms to support the expected weight. She put John and Charles and the Hellens and all the other relations to work preparing the rooms; they hung chandeliers and placed laurel wreaths along the walls with roses in the center twined around a glowing lamp. Excited newspapermen described the scene: carriages choking the streets all around the Adams house from seven in the evening; as many as a thousand guests streaming through the front doors; tables laden with “pies, pastries, sweetmeats, game, candied fruits and fresh Florida oranges”—a gesture, perhaps, to another of General Jackson’s celebrated campaigns. The great man himself arrived at nine; Louisa took him around and made introductions; the general toasted his hostess and promptly left. The party went on until one thirty and was deemed the great event of the social season. Adams and Louisa must have been immensely pleased, though they might have felt differently had they taken the full measure of Jackson’s political potency.
Adams began, very tentatively, to express his views on national questions, chiefly in response to the many letters he received from newspaper editors. Joseph Pleasants of the Richmond Constitutional Whig, a rare defector from that state’s Crawford consensus, wrote to say that he had read an account of Adam’s strong endorsement of the federal right to foster internal improvement. If the report was false, Pleasants wrote, Adams should repudiate it. If true, perhaps Adams could write something that would help the editor “break the course of their effect on public opinion.” In fact, like Clay, Adams was a well-known advocate of internal improvements. The Southern radicals whom Joseph Pleasants hoped to placate argued that the federal government had no right to authorize and pay for the building of roads, bridges, and canals. Adams wrote back to confirm his belief in the federal role. He added, no doubt for the benefit of the readers of Richmond, that he was doing nothing more than following President Monroe’s own policy, for which “his countrymen will rise up and call him blessed.” This was disingenuous, since Monroe approved modest expenditures for internal improvements while holding to the Jeffersonian view that the Constitution prohibited a federal role. Adams added breezily that if Pleasants had now changed his mind about his candidacy, he should feel free to publish the letter “for your justification.”
The tariff was an equally vexed question. Adams believed devoutly in the merits of unfettered trade, but he faced the same dilemma that politicians do today: manufacturing regions demanded protection from foreign imports. In the Western states, Pennsylvania, and inland portions of New York, the tariff was at least as powerful an issue as were internal improvements. But the agricultural states of the South, and to some extent the commercial states of New England, feared that high duties would result in reciprocal forms of protection against American products. Unlike Clay, the champion of tariff protection, Adams took a careful middle position, writing to Robert Walsh, his favorite editor, that he favored a “cautious” tariff. (Jackson described the kind of tariff he favored as “judicious.”) But while he made an effort to place his views on internal improvements in prominent newspapers, he was more circumspect on the tariff.
Slavery was the most dangerous issue of all, and Adams chose not to respond to any of the letters he received on the subject. The reasonable inference is that Adams felt that he had more to lose than to gain by airing his deeply felt views on the subject. That is, though he would not misrepresent his views, he might withhold them. Despite his professions of political nonchalance, he was prepared to be prudent.
In the first months of 1824 the political odds favored William Crawford. Over the summer Crawford had suffered a debilitating stroke, but he was protected from the consequences by the prohibition against public appearances by candidates. The Georgian was widely expected to carry the South, thanks in part to a tacit endorsement from Jefferson. Owing to an alliance he had forged with Martin Van Buren, the shrewd Albany kingmaker, he seemed to have New York sewn up as well. But Crawford and Van Buren made a serious miscalculation. In previous elections the Republican Party had determined its candidate by holding a caucus among party members in Congress. Adams had attended the 1808 caucus, which chose Madison. Crawford had challenged Monroe in 1816 and lost. Now he insisted that the party choose its candidate by caucus once again.
But 1824 was not 1816: the era when men were prepared to let a small group of federal politicians gather in a room and choose the president had passed. Moreover, Crawford now had four rivals, not one, and they and their friends would never permit him to win an early knockout. Newspaper editors allied with other candidates railed against the caucus as a betrayal of democracy. In response to a canvass in late January, 181 members of the House and Senate vowed not to attend, while only 67 said they would. As the caucus approached, Crawford’s rivals made it clear that they would not go. When one of Crawford’s friends had the temerity to approach Adams suggesting that he attend the caucus as the treasury secretary’s choice for vice president, he turned the man away with “an epithet . . . which I will not commit to paper.” When the caucus was held on February 24, only 68 of the 309 senators and representatives voted. Crawford won 64 of the votes, but he had hurt himself far more than he had helped.
The next to fall was Calhoun, who had pinned his hopes on Pennsylvania, the second largest state, which he hoped would embrace his nationalist outlook. But when a state convention was held in Harrisburg on March 8, Jackson won 124 of the 125 votes; Calhoun was named as vice president on 88 ballots. Henceforward he could aspire no higher than the second slot. Clay was exultant at Calhoun’s failure. And when Crawford suffered another stroke, in May, Clay wrote exultantly to a confidante that the Georgian would soon die. The stroke had left Crawford nearly blind and had so impaired his circulation that he walked around with thick layers of cloth wrapped around his freezing feet. But Crawford, a huge, robust man, would recover once again.
Clay was the one candidate who could be said to be “running” for president. He had a platform, and he gave long, impassioned speeches on his favorite topics—the tari
ff, internal improvements, the South American patriots. But he knew very well that policy, by itself, would not carry the day. He needed his friends. One ally, Josiah Johnson, wrote to Clay that a local paper, the Patriot, could “be had in New York for some money.” He was going there, he reported, “to accomplish this object.” Soon thereafter, Johnson wrote back to report: “Secured the Patriot and returnd this morning.” Clay was too careful a man to respond to this subterfuge, but neither did he warn Johnson off.
Adams, meanwhile, was, if not running, then at least unmistakably standing. His front door was spinning with friends, would-be friends, and friends of his rivals: he recorded at the end of March that he had received 235 visitors that month, or 8 a day, taking up at least four hours. They all endlessly turned over possible tickets. Crawford had approached Adams—or rather, friends had approached friends—to ask Adams to serve as his vice president. Jackson had approached Calhoun. The secretary of war was madly plotting: “Calhoun’s game,” Adams recorded in his journal, “is now to unite Jackson’s supporters and mine upon him for Vice-President. Look out for breakers!” Adams looked on this “game” as proof that Calhoun was just another self-aggrandizing politician; from this time forward, encomia to Calhoun disappear from Adams’ journals.
