Andrew Jackson Becomes President

This series has five easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: The Election of 1828.

Introduction
Andrew Jackson was the quintessential populist. He explicitly ran against what we would call today “the establishment elite”. His claim to fame was being a successful general. Henry Clay called him “a military chieftain” unqualified to be President. After Jackson normalized that path to the Presidency, others followed. After Trump, will other “just a reality tv star” business leaders follow?

Jackson was known for his energy and courage and his rugged honesty, qualities which a certain narrowness of view, arbitrariness, and violence of temper never obscured. He attacked what we would now call “the Deep State” of entrenched bureaucrats by instituting “the Spoils System”. His subsequent record as President was marked with deep hostility to the ruling elites, though that most emphatically did not extend to the worst of them all, the slaveholders of which he was one.

This selection is from Life of Andrew Jackson by James Parton published in 1860. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

James Parton (1822-1891) was an American biographer.

Time: 1828

He most real issue in the Presidential contest of 1828 was one which was not stated at the time nor generally perceived. The question was whether “universal suffrage,” so called, was to have any practical effect in the United States. Down to this period in the history of the Republic, the educated few had kept themselves uppermost. Cabinets, congresses, legislatures, governors, mayors, had usually been chosen from the same class of society as that from which the governing men of Europe are chosen. Public life was supposed to require an apprenticeship, as much as any private profession. In short, the ruling class in the United States, as in all other countries, was chiefly composed of men who had been graduated at colleges and had passed the greater part of their lives on carpets.

The truly helpful men and women of this Republic have often sprung from the cabin, and learned to read by the light of pine-knots, and worked their way up to their rightful places as leaders of the people by the strength of their own arm, brain, and resolution.

The scepter was about to be wrested from the hands of those who had not shown themselves worthy to hold it. When they felt it going, however, they made a vigorous clutch, and lost it only after a desperate struggle. In these Jacksonian contests, therefore, we find nearly all the talent, nearly all the learning, nearly all the ancient wealth, nearly all the business activity, nearly all the book-nourished intelligence, nearly all the silver- forked civilization of the country, united in opposition to General Jackson, who represented the country’s untutored instincts.

The number of electoral votes in 1828 was two hundred sixty-one. One hundred thirty-one was a majority. General Jackson received one hundred seventy-eight; Adams eighty-three. With the exception of one electoral district in Maine, Adams and Rush received the entire vote of New England. Of the thirty-six electoral votes cast by the State of New York, Adams and Rush obtained sixteen; Jackson and Calhoun, twenty. New Jersey voted entire for Adams and Rush; so did Delaware. In Maryland, the same candidates obtained a bare majority -— six votes to Jackson’s five. In Georgia, William H. Crawford had influence enough to withdraw seven votes out of nine from Calhoun, and throw them away upon William Smith, of South Carolina. The entire vote of Georgia, however, was given to General Jackson, Crawford more than consenting thereto.

Every other State in the Union -— Pennsylvania, Virginia, both Carolinas, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois -— gave an undivided vote for Jackson and Calhoun. For the Vice-Presidency Calhoun received one hundred seventy-one votes, out of two hundred sixty-one. There were no scattering or wasted votes except the seven cast for William Smith in Georgia.

In all Tennessee, Adams and Rush obtained fewer than three thousand votes. In many towns every vote was cast for Jackson and Calhoun. A distinguished member of the North Carolina Legislature told me that he happened to enter a Tennessee village in the evening of the last day of the Presidential election of 1828. He found the whole male population out hunting -— the objects of the chase being two of their fellow-citizens. He inquired by what crime these men had rendered themselves so obnoxious to their neighbors, and was informed that they had voted against General Jackson. The village, it appeared, had set its heart upon sending up a unanimous vote for the General, and these two voters had frustrated its desire. As the day wore on, the whiskey flowed more and more freely, and the result was a universal chase after the two voters, with a view to tarring and feathering them. They fled to the woods, however, and were not taken.

Very many of the supporters of Adams felt, doubtless, as Ezekiel Webster felt, when he wrote to his brother Daniel, in February, 1829:

The people always supported Adams’s cause from a cold sense of duty, and not from any liking of the man. We soon satisfy ourselves that we have discharged our duty to the cause of any man, when we do not entertain for him one personal kind feeling, and cannot, unless we disembowel ourselves, like a trussed turkey, of all that is human nature within us. If there had been at the head of affairs a man of popular character, like Henry Clay, or any man whom we are not compelled by our natures, instincts, and fixed fate to dislike, the result would have been different.”

So the whole country joined at last in the cry, “Hurrah for Jackson!” Some few daring spirits at Hartford, we are told, burned the President-elect in effigy in the evening of the sacred January 8th; but the public indignation was such that the authorities of the city offered a reward of one hundred dollars for the “conviction of the persons engaged in it.” So says the sedate Niles, who also records, in his brief manner, without comment, that General Jackson did not call upon President Adams on his arrival in Washington. The reader knows why he did not. The precious Register of Mr. Niles rescues likewise from oblivion the fact that “General Merkle, of Franklin Market, New York,” sent to General Jackson “a piece of the celebrated ox, Grand Canal, as a suitable tribute of General Merkle’s high respect for the patriotism General Jackson has uniformly displayed in the public service of his country, and hopes at the same time it may arrive to grace his table on March 4th.”

General Merkle had the pleasure of receiving an autograph acknowledgment from General Jackson: “Permit me, sir, to assure you of the gratification which I felt in being enabled to place on my table so fine a specimen of your market, and to offer you my sincere thanks for so acceptable a token of your regard for my character.” “Hurrah for Jackson!” It was the universal cry. Adams would not have written to General Merkle, of Franklin Market, New York, perhaps. Was there a butcher in the Union who did not take the General’s autograph as a personal compliment!

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