I wrote 15 years ago about Adams’ first year in the
White House, while surveying his prior distinguished diplomatic career and consequential
post-Presidency. But the month in which he fulfilled his ambition for the
nation’s highest office was so astonishing—and such an anticipation of how
current thinly sourced smear campaigns can poison the electorate—that it
deserves exploration in depth.
With the popular James Monroe declining to run for a
third term, the stage was set for an electoral free-for-all in 1824, featuring
four candidates:
*Secretary of State Adams, the
son of another President, John Adams, drew strength from the Northeast,
especially New England.
*Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New
Orleans, looked to a base mostly confined to the West and South, with residual
support in the Northeast.
*Treasury Secretary William Crawford, though the favorite of the Democratic-Republican Party
establishment, had suffered a debilitating stroke before the election. Though
unable to campaign, he retained support in the Deep South.
*Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who earned the least votes in the Electoral College, ended up
exerting the greatest influence on the vote.
The election of 1824 was the first that used the
procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which called
for the House of Representatives to pick among the top three candidates in the
Electoral College.
Those three turned out to be Adams, Jackson, and
Crawford. Although Jackson led the Electoral College count (and, most
historians contend, what would have been the popular vote), he did not have a
majority. Crawford’s medical condition effectively made it a two-man race
between Adams and Jackson.
Four years before, it took the Missouri Compromise to
avert a civil war over slavery. Many of the sectional differences barely
muzzled in that agreement were coming to the fore again.
A sense of déjà vu must have particularly gripped
Adams: as in the election of 1800 (lost by his father), it would take a New York
Federalist to secure the outcome.
But, while Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had
persuaded his side to vote for Thomas Jefferson rather than Aaron Burr in that
earlier election on the 36th House ballot, it took only one ballot—cast
by 60-year-old aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer III—to settle matters in 1825.
Legend holds that, while agonizing on the House floor
over whom to support, Rensselaer noticed a ballot placed in front of him
reading, ADAMS. Believing this to be divinely inspired, the congressman voted
accordingly.
If only matters had remained that simple…
In an early attempt at creating a unifying “team of
rivals” strategy that Abraham Lincoln later used, Adams asked Crawford to
remain as treasury secretary and Jackson to take over the War Department. Both
declined.
The selection of the third rival, Clay, sparked
enormous controversy. The President-elect knew him as a fellow diplomat in the
Treaty of Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812, and though he didn’t
particularly trust the Kentuckian or care for his drinking and gambling, he
knew he was able and shared common domestic policy goals.
Adams asked Clay to become Secretary of State after
his House of Representatives victory, not before (contrary to what some
Websites and podcasts claim to this day).
But, because Clay had swung the vote of his state’s
delegation to Adams, and the State Department had served as a steppingstone to
the Presidency for all occupants of the office in the prior 25 years, an
anonymous letter soon appeared in Philadelphia’s Columbian Observer
charging that the two men had engaged in a “corrupt bargain.”
Eventually, the “anonymous” Congressman emerged from
the shadows to admit being the source of the allegation: George Kremer
of Pennsylvania.
William Russ, Jr.’s article about the
incident in the October 1940 issue of the academic journal Pennsylvania
History noted not only that Kremer had “sunk into
oblivion, even locally,” but that before and after his moment in the spotlight
he was “obscure.” That difficulty in remembering him has only increased with
time.
In 1825, Kremer, then completing his first term as a congressman,
was hardly a disinterested observer, and certainly not a distinguished one. Successive
stints as a storekeeper, lawyer, and two-year state legislator had done nothing
to disabuse perceptions that he was a backbench time-server, a reputation not
helped by his propensity for wearing a leopard-skin coat on the floor of the
House.
The topic that preoccupied Kremer in Congress–eliminating
waste and abuse in government—frequently seemed like a pretext to contest
initiatives that involved funding internal improvements—the policies that Clay
and Adams supported and that Jackson opposed. Kremer, in fact, often
anticipated many of the same arguments that MAGA supporters use today against
government expenditures.
Challenged by Clay to testify and offer evidence
before a congressional committee that would investigate the corruption allegations,
however, Kremer backed down, saying at first, bizarrely, that he hadn’t
intended to "to charge Mr. Clay with corruption," then refusing to
testify on constitutional grounds, before finally crowing, after his three
terms in Congress, how proud he was for his part in spreading the news about
the scandal.
To be sure, backers of all four major candidates
maneuvered furiously for advantage behind the scenes. But no documentary
evidence has ever been produced substantiating the claims about Clay and Adams.
Moreover, despite friction between the two men in the
past, even a shouting match, there could be little doubt that the House Speaker
preferred Adams to Jackson—or, to put it another way, that Clay regarded
Jackson as unsuited for the Presidency by virtue of his military background, hair-trigger
temper, and distrust of banks.
None of that mattered to Jackson. He could have
remembered that Adams, unlike Presidential aspirants like Crawford and
Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had come to his defense in the Monroe
Administration over his overly aggressive responses to Native American raids
from Florida into Georgia.
But it was easier for him to think he’d lost because
of the “corrupt bargain” than because of his incompatibility with Clay. So he
not only nursed a grudge against the two men, but encouraged his supporters to
regard the new administration as illegitimate—not unlike how Donald Trump
convinced his followers that, all evidence to the contrary, the election of
2020 had been stolen from him at the polls.
Like his father, Adams erred in believing that he
could govern above the fray, without benefit of political adherents. Jackson
would not make the same mistake. (The “spoils system” is one Jacksonian legacy
that Trump seems especially eager to copy in his return to the White House.)
When Adams left office four years later, defeated by
the man he’d beaten previously, Jackson, he was one of the unhappiest men ever
to occupy the White House.
Like his father, John Quincy Adams was so peeved by
what transpired in his single term in office that he didn’t stick around for
the inauguration of his successor.
Historians still regard Adams as the greatest
Secretary of State in our history, and, like Jimmy Carter, he earned great
respect for his post-Presidential career (see my prior blog post about
his fight against the Jacksonian “gag rule” meant to squelch any opposition to
slavery in Congress).
But his term in the White House was virtually unrelieved misery for him and his family, because of the stark mismatch between his lofty policy goals and miniscule political instincts.
