What happened during the election of 1824?

Answer 1

Picture this: an election where there was only one party, but with four main candidates all from that party. The people in 3/4 of the states get to vote for Presidential electors who are supposed to vote for the candidate of their choice. In the other 1/4 of the states, no elections are held for President because the legislature gets to pick the electors. None of the 4 candidates gets a majority of the vote, which throws the election into the House of Representatives. In a back room deal, the candidate who received the most popular votes in the states where elections were held for President is frozen out by the other 3 candidates, who choose one of their own as President, with the understanding that he appoint another of them as Secretary of State That's roughly what happened in the Election of 1824.

In 1824, there was only one national political party, called the Democratic-Republicans, which was the legacy of Jefferson's Republican party. By 1824, the President and both houses of Congress were all members of the same party. No matter - the Era of Good Feelings came to an abrupt end as a result of this tumultuous election. The winner of the popular vote (in those states where a Presidential vote was conducted) was Andrew Jackson, the war hero from Tennessee.

The other potential candidates were John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, the Secretary of State; William H. Crawford of Georgia, the Secretary of the Treasury; Congressman Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the House; and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the Secretary of War. Crawford received the nomination of the caucus in Washington, but it was sparsely attended and was widely attacked as undemocratic. In 1823, Crawford suffered a stroke. Even though he recovered in 1824, this crippled his bid for the presidency. Calhoun initially was a serious candidate for the presidency, but he opted instead to seek the Vice Presidency and backed Jackson after seeing the popularity of Crawford in the South. Both Adams' and Jackson's supporters backed Calhoun, giving him an easy majority. Remember, the 12th Amendment mandated separate voting for President and Vice President, so that made Calhoun a shoo-in for Vice President.

Since no candidate for President received a majority, the 12th Amendment mandated that the election be decided by the House of Representatives among the candidates (Jackson, Adams, and Crawford) receiving top 3 electoral votes. Clay, who received the 4th highest number of electoral votes, was not among those to be considered. However, he was Speaker of the House, and so had considerable influence. Adams' victory shocked Jackson, who expected that, as the winner of a plurality of both the popular and electoral votes, he should have been elected President. When President Adams appointed Clay his Secretary of State, essentially declaring him heir to the Presidency-Adams and his three predecessors had all served as Secretary of State-Jackson and his followers accused Adams and Clay of striking a "corrupt bargain". The Jacksonians would campaign on this claim for the next four years, ultimately leading to Jackson's victory in the Adams-Jackson rematch in 1828.