Flashback, February 1825: Adams Victory in Disputed Presidential Race Launches ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge

With none of the three major candidates winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the 1824 Presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which awarded the office to John Quincy Adams in February 1825.

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 36^th 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. 

This Day in New York History (Seward Senate Speech Marks Him as Prime Anti-Slavery Foe)

March 11, 1850—In his maiden speech as U.S. Senator, the New York Whig William H. Seward denounced the Compromise of 1850, an omnibus legislative package that eased secessionist sentiment in the decade before the Civil War. 

The phrase he coined—“a higher law than the Constitution”—thrust him to the forefront of opposition to slavery, proved a stumbling block to his Presidential ambitions, and posed an enduring question about the relevance of faith- and morality-driven action in American politics.

I doubt if one out of a thousand people who pass the statue accompanying this entry have stopped for more than a couple of seconds to think about its subject. Now in the midst of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s collective biography of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet, Team of Rivals, I’ve come to appreciate, maybe for the first time, the opponent-turned-friend of the President, and how much he contributed to the politics of his time, and even of what he means to ours.

As governor of New York in the early 1840s, Seward promoted economic and educational policies meant to open greater opportunities to African-, German- and Irish-Americans who were already forming part of the Democratic coalition. Like John McCain today, he excited a horde of noisome nativists to insane frenzies—in Seward’s case, through a proposal to divert a part of public school funds to parochial schools where Catholic immigrants would not have to worry about Protestant proselytizing. 

(Take note, today’s Republicans: the path to success lies away from fear-mongering about immigrants and the dispossessed. Take note, today’s Democrats: at least some of your “wall of separation” rhetoric about church and state derives from very poisonous roots.)

After a brief hiatus out of office, Seward came back to win a Senate seat, just in time to face the most divisive question of his time: the suddenly real possibility that divisions over slavery could spell the end of the Union.

The Compromise of 1850 was meant to forestall these questions by not giving either North or South entirely what each wanted. The North would get admission of California, almost certain to be a free state, and an end to the slave trade within Washington, D.C. Two other provisions favored the South: the creation of two territories in the Southwest, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery; and strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.

The squall over the Compromise of 1850 is usually remembered as the last hurrah of the Senate’s “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, all of whom would be out of the chamber they dominated, even dead, within three years. Webster’s three-hour March 7 oration in support of the package—an action that revolted his anti-slavery base and doomed his flickering Presidential chances but which also turned the tide toward enactment—was celebrated in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and was long memorized by generations of American schoolchildren.

However, the extensive legislative debate, I would argue, also brought to the fore a new generation of political leaders who dominated the antebellum and Civil War eras. Jefferson Davis assumed the role of Calhoun (so ill that he could not read aloud his fiery speech opposing the bills) as spokesman for the South. Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” best remembered now for his debates later in the decade with Abraham Lincoln, acted, like Clay, as legislative magician by crafting the legislation and rounding up enough votes to ensure passage.

And Seward took on the part that Webster, in his zeal to preserve the Union, had relinquished: champion of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Beginning in a low voice decidedly removed from the great tolling bell that was Webster’s, he soon transfixed the Massachusetts Senator and his colleagues.

He could not support the proposals, he said. Strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law was unworthy of “true Christians or real freemen”; not just the slave trade, but slavery itself should not be permitted in the District of Columbia; and he could not abide the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.

Not only the spirit of the Constitution was incompatible with slavery, Seward claimed, but “there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe.”

Even though he lost this legislative battle, Seward became the foremost spokesman for free-soil forces in the Senate. But he had provoked so much fierce opposition in the South that his enemies began to approach his friends in number and vehemence.

Political mentor Thurlow Weed’s confession that Seward’s speech “sent me to bed with a heavy heart” proved all too prescient in 1860. With the Whig Party dead by then, Seward sought the Republican Party nomination for President. But his long public anti-slavery record left such a long public trail that it opened the door to a relative dark-horse candidate: Abraham Lincoln.

Seward’s loyal and able service as Lincoln’s Secretary of State is how posterity fundamentally recalls him, and it’s certainly not a bad claim on our attention. But the “higher law” that this usually affable, conciliatory statesman invoked has, in one fashion or another, convulsed American politics throughout the republic.

In one sense, Seward’s appeal derives from the concept of natural law that has found advocates from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson. It also meshes with the theory of civil disobedience formulated by Henry David Thoreau only a year before the Seward speech and perfected as a political tool by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th century.

But a “higher law” also has the potential of angering people who might not share one’s religious faith or even notions of morality. Applied to certain issues—Prohibition, abortion—it has polarized the American electorate for decades.

And yet, it would be a mistake to call, as some have done in this election year, for the marginalizing of moral calls to action in the political arena. Refusal to appeal to morality produces consequences in the populace that necessarily reflect the Darwinian atmosphere of politics. Does anyone think that the United States would have been a better nation without the backing that the civil rights movement received from African-American ministers or that the unionists gained from the Roman Catholic Church?

Quote of the Day (Henry Clay, on Rather Being ‘Right Than Be President’)

“I did not send for you to ask what might be the effect of the proposed movement on my prospects, but whether it was right; I had rather be right than be President.”—U.S. Senator (and perennial Presidential also-ran) Henry Clay, on the potential impact of a speech on slavery to be delivered Feb. 7, 1839, quoted in a speech by Sen. William C. Preston (to whom the remark was addressed), reported in Niles Register, Mar. 23, 1839

I had heard of this quote from Henry Clay (1777-1852)—as thousands of American schoolchildren have since it was first uttered—but always thought it came from a speech. But the words in question were uttered before the address, as Clay tested its argument and reception on Sen. Preston.

Much to his dismay, Clay not only never got to be President, but had to watch while other men of distinctly less skill reached the White House. He could only content himself with the thought that on three separate occasions—in 1820, 1833 and 1850—he had brokered compromises that enabled the Union he loved to remain intact for another 40 years, without immediately sundering over the issue of slavery. 

All of that occasioned costs: to the American conscience, which for the first half of the 19^th century resolutely avoided confronting and ending a system that degraded an entire class of human beings; to Clay’s own hopes for higher office (the February 1839 led Northern abolitionists to wash their hands of him); and, ultimately, to his place in history, as he lacked the ultimate, Presidential power to affect events. 

Clay deserves to be better remembered today, as he was throughout the 19^th century.  His impact is especially important in understanding two Republicans who very much wanted to become President: Abraham Lincoln and Newt Gingrich.

Let’s discuss first the inferior of these two. Upon becoming Speaker of the House in 1995, Gingrich had Clay as his model for a leader every bit as powerful as the President. 

But Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” announced with fanfare as a series of reform measures, lost traction the longer Gingrich was in power, and never possessed the overarching vision of Clay’s “American System” of economic development that would have tied the country together. Voters punished Gingrich’s push to impeach Bill Clinton by reducing the GOP’s edge in the House, and he lost power after when he was discovered to have committed the same offense \that he took exception to in Clinton’s case.

When all is said and done, Gingrich’s legacy will be the reverse of Clay’s: not preserving shards of unity and civility, but heightening the disorder and fury in American politics, according to an article by McKay Coppins in the November 2018 issue of The Atlantic:

“[F]ew figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.”

As for Lincoln, the influence of Clay was far more benign. An admirer of “The Great Compromiser” from his youth, Lincoln instinctively sought gradual change before being pushed toward more transformative measures. Much of his agenda in the White House—notably, legislation bringing about the transcontinental railroad—might be understood as an attempt to enact elements of Clay’s “American System.”

Above all, in his attitude toward slavery and the Union, Lincoln resembled his hero. Though a slaveholder during his lifetime, Clay manumitted his slaves in his will. Fearing that slaves could never be accepted into American society, he sought to colonize them back in Africa—a stance that Lincoln advocated, only to regretfully abandon it in office when he saw no possibility of it ever being legislated. Above all, his guiding principle was the preservation of the Union.

Flashback, July 1817: Erie Canal Begins Construction

With a second war with Great Britain concluded, New York State could stop worrying so much about its borders and start a construction project with deep nationalistic implications. Backers of the Erie Canal were intent on boosting the economic power of their state, but in the process they cemented commercial ties between the Northeast and the Midwest that proved essential in binding the two regions together 40 years later against a slaveholding South before and during the Civil War.

The project, whose construction began, with appropriate symbolism, on July 4, was the engineering wonder of its era, using 18 aqueducts to carry the canal over ravines and rivers, and 83 locks, with a rise of 568 feet, winding through 363 miles of New York’s interior from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Four feet deep and 40 feet wide, it floated boats carrying 30 tons of freight, allowing heavy loads to be transported at one-tenth the cost of moving them by road. 

And all of this was finished two years ahead of schedule. Impossible to believe in this era of cost overruns.

Because of the methods he used here and on other canals, as well as the men he employed on them who went off to work on still other projects, chief engineer Benjamin Wright was called “The Father of American Civil Engineering” in 1969 by the American Society of Civil Engineers. But another man was more fundamental to the project in mobilizing popular support and seeing it through every difficulty: DeWitt Clinton.

New York governors, even those who have served a considerable length of time, are often known for one accomplishment that serves as historical shorthand. With Thomas E. Dewey, it was New York’s extensive highway-building program; with Nelson Rockefeller, expanding the state university system; and with Hugh Carey, rescuing New York City from bankruptcy.

Clinton served in almost every conceivable office at the local and state level: State Assemblyman and State Senator, New York City Mayor, U.S. Senator, and Lieutenant Governor. But none of his achievements in any of these posts matched the importance of what he was able to do as Governor, except maybe his 15 years as New York Canal Commissioner, when he advocated for both the Champlain and Erie Canals.

Henry Adams’s towering account of a critical period in the early America, History of the United States of America During the Second Administration of James Madison, noted that proposals had already been made for canals and roads in the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and Virginia (George Washington was an especially prominent proponent), but they could not overcome rough terrain—100 miles of mountains—in their interior. In contrast, “New York had but to people a level and fertile district, nowhere fifty miles from navigable water, in order to reach the great Lake system, which had no natural outlet within the Union except through the city of New York. So obvious was the idea of a canal from the Lakes to the Hudson that it was never out of men's minds, even before the war; and no sooner did peace return than the scheme took large proportions.”

In a landmark 1808 Report on Roads, Canals, Harbors and Rivers, Thomas Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, proposed four great canals along the eastern coast. Gallatin’s credibility with the Jeffersonians bode well for New York legislators' hope that federal funding could be secured for the Erie route.

But Jefferson’s convictions that federal funding for internal improvements required a constitutional amendment persuaded his friend and successor James Madison, who vetoed, as one of the last acts of his Presidency, John C. Calhoun’s bill for a system of canals and roads. (See my prior post on this foiled legislation.)

By forcing New York to act on its own, however, Madison ensured that the Southern agrarian economy championed by him, Jefferson and Madison’s successor, James Monroe, would become increasingly dependent on a single crop—cotton—and that it would fall behind the North in industry.

The impact of the Erie Canal on New York—on the nation as a whole, even—was widespread:

*It opened vast stretches of the interior of the state. Before 1810, New York was most heavily populated in the east, along the Hudson River. The Western portion of the state was even considered the frontier. The canal changed all that. Business and industry followed settlers in the wake of the canal.

*It boosted cities upstate. Except for Binghamton and Elmira, every major city in New York State lies along the trade route established by the Erie Canal, from New York City to Albany, through Schenectady, Utica and Syracuse, to Rochester and Buffalo.

*It made New York City the indispensable commercial city of the Northeast. Not long before construction began on the canal, Philadelphia and Boston exceeded New York in size. Just 15 years after the canal’s opening, however, Gotham had overtaken them as the busiest seaport in the country. It had what those other ports didn’t: access to the booming granaries of the Midwest.

*It ignited settlement of the frontier. New York City became the principal entry point for immigrants planning to press on to the West, as the canal provided a quicker, overland route past the Appalachians. The vast waterways of the Midwest—the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers—lay beyond, to lands that, after the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812, was less likely to suffer from British incitement of Native-Americans against new settlers.

*It spawned immigration with opportunities for low-paying labor. Although an estimated three-quarters of canal workers were born in the United States, construction of the canal still meant gainful employment for Irish and Welsh immigrants. It was an important precedent of assimilation before the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.

*It inadvertently became a national security asset to the United States. Without the Erie, the United States would have been left with one principal means of moving food from the Midwest: the Mississippi. Lying deep in Southern territory, New Orleans would have presented rich possibilities for antebellum politicians to exert economic pressures on anti-slavery forces in the Midwest, including a blockade or boycott. Instead, because New York became an alternative port because of the Erie, as a “free-soil” ideology hostile to the use of slave labor flourished in the Midwest.

* It became a symbolic advertisement for the free enterprise system. This commercial and engineering marvel had not been built by slaves, as in the case of Egypt’s pyramids, but by free men. It also served as a lasting rebuke to the slaveholding south, a point made by Revolutionary War poet Philip Freneau in “On the Great Western Canal of the State of New York”:

“Not China's wall, though stretching far,

Which this vast object can compare,

With such gigantic works of old

This proud Canal may be enrolled,

“Which to our use no tyrant gave

Nor owes its grandeur to one Slave.”

*It inspired a wider program of public-works projects and politicians committed to them. One of these was an ambitious attorney-politician in the Midwest who hoped to become “The DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” As a state legislator, he advocated the construction, use, and expansion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, as well as wider improvements in transportation supported by his idol, Henry Clay. Once he became President, this former railroad lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, made one of the biggest non-war priorities of his administration passage of the bill starting the Transcontinental Railroad.

This Day in Southern History (Calhoun, Nationalism, and Early Infrastructure Politics)

Feb. 8, 1817—The U.S. House passed a $1.5 million public works bill proposed by rising young Congressman John C. Calhoun as a means of binding the nation together and was also quickly embraced by the Senate. But on March 3—his last full day in office—President James Madison vetoed the “Bonus Bill” as unconstitutional.

The fate of the legislation represented a kind of road not taken for Calhoun and the South. Within a few years, the Democratic-Republican Representative from South Carolina would abandon his broad nationalist perspective, becoming the voice of sectionalism and the architect of the secessionist movement that culminated in the Civil War. Without resort to federal funds, the South never embraced public-works projects with the same avid interest as the other regions, dooming it to a narrow dependence on the cotton crop and the apparatus (included slavery) needed to prop it up.

The shifting politics associated with public-works legislation in the early years of the republic tells something about our own time as well, however, another era when undercurrents beneath long-established political parties upend prior positions about the need for infrastructure.

In the current Congress, the GOP leadership is trying to square the circle posed by new President Donald Trump—who has not only wanted to allocate money for infrastructure, but actually boasted in his campaign about creating more such projects than Hillary Clinton—with their own adamant opposition to such plans under Barack Obama.

Calhoun would have understood this acute discomfort. Shortly after election to Congress in 1810 at age 28, he had become one of the principal “War Hawks” who dvocated challenging Britain’s infringement on American sovereignty on the high seas and in Western territories. In the process, “[f]or fifteen years he remained the most ardent worker for national unity and national power,” according to Richard Hofstadter’s classic chapter on him in The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (1948).  “He was for more troops, more funds, for manufactures, federal roads, a higher tariff, and a new national bank. Impatient with ‘refined arguments on the Constitution,’ he waved all constitutional objections aside.”

The War of 1812 exposed deep geopolitical fissures in the nation, but not yet in Calhoun’s nationalist bent. New England Federalists had even held the Hartford Convention in 1814 as a means of exploring disunion. While such a radical notion had discredited the Federalists as a national party, it also set others—Calhoun among them—to wondering how to stitch the Union together in such a way that what was then a tear would not widen into an outright rip in the national fabric. 

Calhoun wanted to use the revenue "bonus" and future dividends from the just-established Second Bank of the United States for a fund that would "bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals." In a speech given Feb. 4, 1817, he foresaw terrible danger ahead if any other course were followed, but never dreamed that, for the next 30 years, he would be more responsible than anyone else in the nation for bringing it closer:

“Let it not be forgotten, let it be forever kept in mind, that the extent of the republic exposes us to the greatest of calamities—disunion. We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing. This is our price and danger, our weakness and our strength. . . .We are under the most imperious obligations to counteract every tendency to disunion. . . . Whatever impedes the intercourse of the extremes with this, the center of the republic, weakens the union.”

Calhoun’s bill passed the House by only 86-84. Thirty-three of the negative votes were cast by New England Federalists. In the Senate the vote was a more comfortable 20-15. In both houses the most solid opposition came from New England Federalists, who objected more because of sectional self-interest rather than constitutional reasons, according to Henry Adams’ magisterial History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison.

But President Madison, like his mentor Thomas Jefferson, did object to it for those reasons, as did the third of the Virginia Jeffersonians in the White House, James Monroe. All three felt that the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution was far too thin a reed to hang such an important measure on. If paying for roads and canals had been contemplated by the Framers, they claimed, they should have been enumerated in that document.

But the time a President came along who agreed that the federal government had a role to play in internal improvements, John Quincy Adams, the proposal was being evaluated on the basis of the men who made it rather than its own merits. The most forceful advocate of the “American System” of roads and canals as an instrument of nationalism was Henry Clay, who got his job as Secretary of State—until that time, a steppingstone to the White House—after supporting Adams for President when the election of 1824 was thrown into the House of Representatives.

The possibility of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay so infuriated supporters of Andrew Jackson that they mobilized to ensure that no significant Adams legislation would pass. In particular, they stymied federal action related to internal improvements.

Additionally, the “American System” was associated with protective tariffs meant to protect fledgling industries. Calhoun, too, had supported these tariffs initially. But by the mid-1820s, South Carolina’s economy had come to depend far more exclusively on agriculture than other industries. Moreover, the higher tariffs increased the cost of imported goods that planter aristocrats had to pay. No politician could survive in the state by supporting this. 

By the mid-1820s, Calhoun had adjusted, aligning his stances with the slavocrats to abandon his former nationalist outlook, including increasingly vociferous opposition to the protective tariff. The talented, highly intelligent politician, who had gone on to win praise from colleagues like John Quincy Adams as Secretary of War under Monroe, was being seriously talked about as a possible Presidential candidate. But his hopes never advanced beyond serving as Vice-President under Adams and Andrew Jackson. When he resigned in the administration of the latter, he went to the Senate, where he opposed fellow members of the "Great Triumvirate," Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as an increasingly stubborn proponent of states' right.

The salience of slavery as a national issue would very likely still have compelled Calhoun into his eventual role as the great theorist of secessionist. But the veto of his "Bonus Bill" meant that the South would not create the kind of widespread network of roads and canals that promoted the economic diversity of the other regions and, by the time of the Civil War, had knit them together through mutual interests. Starting in the 1820s, canals (and later railroads) such as the Erie Canal linked the Northeast and Midwest, siphoning off river traffic that might have come to New Orleans, for instance. Henry Adams is on point in noting the impact of Calhoun's failed project:

“Madison's veto,… although at first it seemed to affect most the interests of New York, was in reality injurious only to the Southern States. Had the government lent its aid to the Erie Canal, it must have assisted similar schemes elsewhere, and in the end could hardly have refused to carry out [former Treasury Secretary Albert] Gallatin's plan of constructing canals from the Chesapeake to the Ohio, and from the Santee to the Tennessee River. The veto disappointed New York only for the moment, but was fatal to Southern hopes."