Born on April 28, 1758, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, James Monroe enjoyed all the advantages accruing to the son of a prosperous planter. His father, Spence Monroe, traced his ancestry back to relative who had fought at the side of Charles I in the English civil wars before being captured and exiled to Virginia in 1649. His mother, Elizabeth Jones Monroe, was of Welsh heritage but little is known about her. Beginning at the age of 11, Monroe attended a school run by Reverend Archibald Campbell. His time at this school overlapped with that of John Marshall, who later became the chief justice of the United States.
Eager Patriot
Monroe's parents died when he was in his mid-teens, his father having passed away in 1774 and his mother likely doing so some time earlier (though her actual date of death is unknown). James and his siblings shared an inheritance of land and some slaves, and he and his two brothers—his sister had already married—became wards of their uncle, Joseph Jones. Jones became a mentor and friend to James, often offering him advice and support.
In 1774, Monroe entered the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His education took place not only in the classroom but also throughout the town, which was the capital of colonial Virginia. It was an exciting time to be in Williamsburg. Royal Governor Dunmore had fled the capital, fearing that the colonists were a danger to him and his family; after he left, Monroe and some of his fellow classmates helped loot the arsenal at the Governor's Palace. They escaped with 200 muskets and 300 swords, which they donated to the Virginia militia. By the winter of 1776, in the wake of Lexington and Concord, Monroe had joined the Virginia infantry. He became an officer in the Continental Army and joined General George Washington's army in New York.
During the Revolution, Monroe fought with distinction in several important battles, including Trenton, Monmouth, Brandywine, and Germantown. He was severely hurt at the Battle of Trenton, suffering a near fatal wound to his shoulder as he led a charge against enemy cannon. After recuperating, he became a staff officer for General William Alexander. By the end of his service with the Continental Army, he had gained the rank of major; however, because of an excess of officers, he had little possibility of commanding soldiers in the field. He thus resigned his commission in the Continental Army in 1779 and was appointed colonel in the Virginia service. In 1780, Governor Thomas Jefferson sent Monroe to North Carolina to report on the advance of the British.
Quick Jump into Politics
After the war, Monroe studied law, taking Thomas Jefferson as his mentor. He was elected to the Virginia Assembly in 1782 and then served on the Council of State, which advised the governor. Elected to the Continental Congress in 1783, Monroe worked for expanding the power of Congress, organizing government for the western country, and protecting American navigation on the Mississippi River.
While in New York as a member of the Continental Congress, Monroe met Elizabeth Kortright, the daughter of Lawrence Kortright, a prominent local merchant who had lost much of his wealth during the Revolution. She was sixteen at the time, and Monroe was twenty-six; they married the following year, on February 16, 1786. Having passed the Virginia bar in 1782, Monroe and his new bride moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he practiced law.
Among the leading political figures in Virginia, Monroe exhibited an independent streak when he voted against ratifying the U.S. Constitution as a delegate to the state's ratification convention. He wanted a Constitution that allowed for the direct election of senators as well as the President, and the inclusion of a strong bill of rights. After the ratification of the new Constitution, Monroe unsuccessfully challenged James Madison for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Monroe lost by 300 votes, yet the state legislature appointed him to the U.S. Senate in 1790. He thereafter joined with Madison and Jefferson, with whom he had become friendly in the mid-1780s, to oppose the Federalist policies championed by Vice President John Adams and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. The three Virginians would remain lifelong friends and allies.
Minister to France and Britain
In 1794, President George Washington sent Monroe to Paris as U.S. minister to France. It was an eventful appointment that lasted two years. When Thomas Paine, the British pamphleteer and supporter of the American Revolution, was imprisoned for having spoken against the execution of King Louis XVI, Monroe won his release and allowed Paine to live for a time with his family at the American minister's residence in Paris.
Monroe's tenure in France was far from easy. Revolutionary France was an unstable place and the new minister had to tread carefully. His mission was to uphold President Washington's policy of strict neutrality toward Britain and France while still assuring the French that America was not favoring Britain. This task became harder when France learned that the United States had signed a new accord— the Jay Treaty—with Great Britain. When France asked Monroe to spell out its details, the President found himself unable to comply: Jay had refused to send him a copy of the document. Although Monroe told the French that the treaty did not alter their agreements, the French were convinced that the United States now favored Britain. In the end, U.S. domestic politics doomed Monroe's tenure in Paris. The Federalists blamed Monroe for deteriorating relations with France, and Washington recalled him.
Out of power momentarily, Monroe returned to Virginia to practice law and attend to his plantations. He was elected governor in 1799 and worked vigorously in support of public education and the election of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1800. In 1803, the victorious Jefferson sent Monroe to France as a special envoy to help negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. Monroe then served as the U.S. minister to Britain from 1803 to 1807 with a brief stint as a special envoy to Spain in 1805. In Spain, Monroe tried to negotiate a treaty to cede the Spanish territory along the Gulf of Mexico to the United States. However, he soon realized that Spain had no intention of signing such a treaty and so returned to Britain.
During his tenure in Britain, he tried to negotiate an end to impressments—the British practice of seizing U.S. sailors and forcing them to serve in the British Navy. Although Monroe signed a treaty with Britain in 1806 resolving some outstanding issues, the treaty did not include a ban on impressments, and President Jefferson did not even submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for consideration. Monroe was upset that Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison did not see the treaty as he did—as a first step toward better relations with Britain. But Jefferson and Madison knew that current political attitudes would never support a treaty without a ban on impressments. Although this episode caused a brief rift between the three friends, Monroe recognized that the President had to take domestic politics into account when considering his foreign policy options. Following his return home in 1808, Monroe was tapped by dissident Republicans to oppose Madison for the Democratic-Republican presidential nomination. Although Monroe allowed himself to be nominated, he never considered his challenge to Madison seriously and stressed that he differed with Madison only with respect to foreign affairs; in all other areas, the two saw eye-to-eye. Madison easily won the 1808 presidential election. Three years later, in January 1811, Monroe was once again elected governor of Virginia, though he did not serve for long; that April, Madison named him secretary of state.
Secretary of State and Secretary of War
As the nation's chief diplomat, Monroe focused on relations with Britain and France. The two European countries were at war with one another and their fighting infringed upon U.S. shipping and trade. The United States wanted France and Britain to respect American commercial interests as befitted those of a neutral country. Although both nations targeted American trade, the Madison administration concentrated primarily on Britain because of its frequent practice of seizing U.S. sailors and forcing them to serve in the British navy. The United States declared war on Britain in June 1812, but the war was far from popular. Many New Englanders found that it disrupted their access to European markets. Additional numbers thought that neutrality rights were not a sufficient reason to go to war. However, Madison and Monroe both believed that the United States needed to resist British depredations by force of arms.
From the beginning, the war was a disaster for the United States. The army was unequipped and unprepared, and the initial military actions resulted in defeat. When Madison's secretary of war resigned, Monroe took over the office on a temporary basis, from December 1812 to February 1813; he would do so again from August 1814 until March 1815. Monroe was well suited to the demands of the post because of his understanding of the military and his strong organizational skills. He helped reorganize the army and brought new energy to the war effort.
In August 1814, when British troops appeared at the mouth of the Potomac River, Monroe led a scouting party to report on their advance. He sent word to Madison warning that the British were marching toward Washington, D.C. As British troops headed toward the capital, Monroe stayed in the city to help with its evacuation. After the British attacked Washington and burned most of the government buildings, Monroe returned to the city. Madison then placed him in charge of its defenses.
Monroe's popularity rose after the war, due to his tireless service in Madison's cabinet. A new generation of war veterans would remember his leadership with fondness and respect, leaving him well-positioned to receive the Democratic-Republican nomination for President in the 1816 election.
The Campaign and Election of 1816:
When James Madison announced his decision to continue the custom of serving only two terms as President, James Monroe stood in a commanding position for the Democratic-Republican nomination as Madison's heir apparent. He encountered opposition, however, as some people chafed at the prospect of yet another President from Virginia—of the first four Presidents, three had been from the Commonwealth.
Monroe's main opposition came from William H. Crawford, a former senator from Georgia who had also served in Madison's cabinet. Although Crawford had a lot of support in Congress, he lacked a national constituency. By contrast, Monroe had great support throughout the country. Crawford held back from waging a full campaign for the nomination for fear of alienating Monroe and losing the possibility of a cabinet seat following a Monroe victory. When Republicans in Congress caucused to choose their presidential nominee, they selected Monroe by a vote of 65 to 54. They also nominated New York Governor Daniel D. Tompkins to run as vice-president.
The Federalists, who had all but disappeared as a political entity in the aftermath of the War of 1812, did not formally nominate a presidential candidate. Federalist opposition to the war and public perceptions of the party as unpatriotic and possibly treasonous led most members to abandon the party name altogether. The opposition candidate with whom old-time Federalists identified and informally endorsed was Rufus King of New York, who had had a long and distinguished public career.
Before the election, a few of King's supporters restated Monroe's diplomatic failures, but few newspapers openly criticized Monroe or suggested that King would make a better President. In fact, Monroe's popularity carried the day. He was respected as the "last framer" of the Constitution, even though he had opposed its ratification. Supporters also painted him as the man who had fought alongside General Washington and as the last of the Revolutionary generation to be President of the United States. Monroe ended up winning a majority of electoral votes in sixteen states: Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. King won only three states: Connecticut, Delaware, and Massachusetts. The total Electoral College vote came in at 183 for Monroe and 34 for King.
The Election of 1820
After four years in office, Monroe's renomination was such a foregone conclusion that few Democratic-Republicans attended the congressional nominating caucus in April 1820. Not wanting to embarrass the President with only a handful of votes, the caucus declined to make a formal nomination. Neither did the few remaining Federalists bother to endorse an opponent. As a result, Monroe and Vice President Tompkins ran unopposed.
This was the first time since the election of President Washington that a presidential election went uncontested. Even former President John Adams, founder of the Federalist Party, came out of retirement to serve as a Monroe elector in Massachusetts. Only one of the electors, Governor William Plumer of New Hampshire, did not vote for Monroe, casting a vote for Secretary of State John Quincy Adams instead.
At the beginning of Monroe's presidency, Americans were feeling generally optimistic. The nation had declared victory in the War of 1812 and the economy was booming, allowing Monroe to turn his attention toward domestic issues. The new President, moreover, was personable, extremely popular, and interested in reaching out to all the regions of the country.
National Tours
Prior to moving into the still damaged Executive Mansion, which was burned by the British during the War of 1812, President James Monroe revived the presidential tour of the country, which was first undertaken by George Washington. The stated reason for the tour was to inspect defense fortifications, but it also allowed Monroe to reach out to Americans throughout the nation and exhibit his relaxed and affable personality. In June 1817, Monroe began his first tour of the North, traveling up the coast to Portland, Maine. From there, he turned west to Detroit and then southeast back to Washington, D.C. The trip took fifteen weeks and allowed Monroe to come in contact with more people than any previous sitting President. Everywhere he went, he was praised and applauded. The Boston Columbian Centinel described his reception in Massachusetts as the beginning of an "Era of Good Feelings" for the nation—a phrase that is now often used to describe Monroe's presidency.
The first tour was such a success that Monroe embarked on two others—one of the Chesapeake Bay area in 1818 and one of the South and West in 1819. Although those trips did not match the enthusiasm of the first, they gave Monroe an opportunity to reach out to different regions of the country. All three tours helped familiarize the people with their President, and Monroe's endearing personality won many converts.
Monroe's Cabinet
One of Monroe's first acts as President was to put together his cabinet. Wanting to assemble a group of advisers from different regions of the country, he turned to New England native John Quincy Adams as his secretary of state. Adams had a long diplomatic career, and with their similar backgrounds in foreign affairs the two men established a good working relationship. Monroe then chose William H. Crawford from Georgia as secretary of treasury and sought out a westerner to serve as secretary of war. Unable to persuade his first choices, he picked to John C. Calhoun from South Carolina. Monroe turned to an old friend, William Wirt, to be his attorney general and decided to keep Benjamin Crowninshield as secretary of the navy. Monroe's cabinet has often been noted as an exceptionally strong one. The President assembled a group of intelligent and talented men who were very good administrators. He then gave them a lot of freedom to do their jobs. Although he encouraged debate and solicited advice from his cabinet, there was never any doubt that he was firmly in charge. He made the final decisions and expected his cabinet to support and implement them.
The Panic of 1819
Two years into his presidency, Monroe faced an economic crisis known as the Panic of 1819. It was the first major depression to hit the country since the 1780s. The panic stemmed from declining imports and exports, and sagging agricultural prices. A number of state banks suspended payment on their notes and declared bankruptcy, with the Second Bank of the United States shifting to more conservative policies. The result was high unemployment and an increase in bankruptcies and foreclosures.
Although some critics derided Monroe for not responding more forcefully to the economic downturn, he could do little to alleviate its short-term effects. The power to change economic policies rested with the states and the Bank of the United States. In addition, Monroe believed that depressions were natural features of a maturing economy and that the U.S. economy would soon rebound from the panic (and indeed it did—the depression ended by 1823). Monroe did support the policy proposed by Secretary of Treasury William Crawford to relax payment terms on mortgages for lands purchased from the federal government.
The Missouri Compromise
Early in 1819, settlers in the Missouri Territory applied for admission to the Union. Approximately 16 percent of the Missouri settlers were enslaved blacks, and most of the white settlers either owned slaves or hoped to become slave owners in the future. Congressional debate on Missouri exploded when Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. of New York attached two amendments to the statehood bill. The first barred new slaves from entering the state; the second emancipated all Missouri slaves born after admission upon their 25th birthday. In other words, the Tallmadge amendments would admit Missouri only as a free state.
The North held a small majority in the House of Representatives in 1819, and the South controlled a bare majority in the Senate. Voting on the Tallmadge amendments was strictly sectional: the amendments passed in the House but lost in the Senate. The House refused to admit Missouri as a slave state and the Senate insisted upon it. Monroe, along with many congressional leaders, understood the volatile nature of the debate and the strong regional divide over slavery.
However, he thought it was unconstitutional to place special restrictions on the admission of one state, as the Tallmadge amendments did, and threatened to veto any bill including such restrictions. Monroe feared that the dispute would divide the Union and worked in support of a compromise package in Congress. However, he did not forcefully inject himself into the process because he did not want to be accused of meddling in congressional affairs. A new Congress convened in the winter of 1819, allowing legislators to reach an accord that settled the dispute. Massachusetts allowed its far northern counties to apply for admission to the Union as the free, or non-slave, state of Maine, thus offsetting fears that the South would gain votes in the Senate with the admission of Missouri. Additionally, it was agreed—after much behind-the-scenes deal-making—that Missouri would be admitted as a slave state in return for the South's willingness to outlaw slavery in western territories above the 36/30' north latitude line. That line would open present-day Arkansas and Oklahoma to slavery but would forbid it throughout the rest of the Louisiana Territory—land that would eventually be organized into nine states. Monroe signed the bill on March 6, 1820, after he was satisfied that the provisions were, indeed, constitutional.
The American System
As the United States continued to grow, many Americans advocated a system of internal improvements to help the country develop. Monroe thought this a good idea; he believed that the young nation needed an improved infrastructure, including a transportation network to grow and thrive economically. However, he did not think that the Constitution said anything about the authority to build, maintain, and operate a national transportation system. He therefore urged Congress to introduce a constitutional amendment granting it such power. Congress never acted on his suggestion because many legislators thought they already had the implied authority to enact such measures.
The issue came to a head when Congress passed a bill in 1822 to repair the Cumberland Road, or National Road, and equip it with a system of tolls. This great national road ran from Cumberland, Maryland, to the town of Wheeling in western Virginia. Monroe vetoed the bill, however; it was his contention that the states through which the road passed should undertake the setting up and collecting of tolls because Congress lacked the authority to do so. Yet after discussing the issue with many people, including some justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the President changed his mind. In 1824, he signed an internal improvements bill that allocated money for surveys and estimates for the proposed roads. In 1825, he signed a bill that extended the Cumberland Road from Wheeling to Zanesville, Ohio.
Political Parties
After the War of 1812, the Federalists were mostly discredited because of their opposition to the conflict. Although the government had enacted much of their program, such as the national bank and a protective tariff, they could not mount a serious challenge to Monroe.
As President, Monroe encouraged the decline of the parties, believing that the government could operate without them. His tenure was not without partisanship, however; although Monroe talked about ridding American politics of party affiliation, he was unwilling to appoint any Federalists to his cabinet, believing the ideological differences were just too great. In some ways, the absence of a party system increased his difficulties as President. Without parties, he could not rely on a presumed loyalty to help accomplish his goals. With clear divides over issues and the existence of many different factions, Monroe had to create coalitions and build consensus to get his programs enacted.
Even without the existence of two clear parties, the evident partisanship in American politics reached new heights during the presidential election of 1824. In fact, during the last few years of his presidency, some of Monroe's policies were hampered by the political aspirations of congressmen and by even his own cabinet members. So instead of presiding over the decline of political parties, the Monroe presidency helped to foster a transition from the first party system of the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists to the second party system of the Democrats and the Whigs.
In the realm of foreign affairs, James Monroe sought to improve the country's international reputation and assert its independence. By virtue of his solid working relationship with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the two men successfully pursued an aggressive foreign policy, especially with regard to European intervention in the Americas.
In its early days, the Monroe administration wanted to improve relations with Britain. Toward that end, it negotiated two important accords with Britain that resolved border disputes held over from the War of 1812. The Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817, named after acting Secretary of State Richard Rush and Charles Bagot, the British minister, demilitarized the Great Lakes, limiting each country to one 100-ton vessel armed with a single 18-pound cannon on Lake Chaplain and Lake Ontario. The Convention of 1818 fixed the present U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel. The accords also established a joint U.S.-British occupation of Oregon for the next ten years.
Spanish Florida
For years, southern plantation owners and white farmers in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina had lost runaway slaves to the Florida swamps. Seminole and Creek Indians offered refuge to these slaves and led raids against white settlers in the border regions. The U.S. government could do little about the problem because the swamps lay deep within Spanish Florida. If the United States moved decisively against the Seminoles, it would risk war with Spain. Although the United States had tried to convince Spain to cede the territory on various occasions (including during Monroe's stint as special envoy to Spain in 1805), its efforts had failed.
With the end of the War of 1812, the U.S. government turned its attention to the raids. President Monroe sent General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, to the Florida border in 1818 to stop the incursions. Liberally interpreting his vague instructions, Jackson's troops invaded Florida, captured a Spanish fort at St. Marks, took control of Pensacola, and deposed the Spanish governor. He also executed two British citizens whom he accused of having incited the Seminoles to raid American settlements.
The invasion of Florida caused quite a stir in Washington, D.C. Although Jackson said he had acted within the bounds of his instructions, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun disagreed and urged Monroe to reprimand Jackson for acting without specific authority. In addition, foreign diplomats and some congressmen demanded that Jackson be repudiated and punished for his unauthorized invasion. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams came to Jackson's defense, stating that Jackson's measures were, in fact, authorized as part of his orders to end the Indian raids. Monroe ultimately agreed with Adams. To the administration, the entire affair illustrated the lack of control Spain had over the region. Secretary of State Adams thought that he could use the occasion to pressure Spain to sell all of Florida to the United States. Preoccupied with revolts throughout its Latin American empire, Spain understood that the United States could seize the territory at will. Adams convinced Spain to sell Florida to the United States and to drop its claims to the Louisiana Territory and Oregon. In return, the United States agreed to relinquish its claims on Texas and assume responsibility for $5 million that the Spanish government owed American citizens. The resulting treaty, known as the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819—named after John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onís, the Spanish minister—was hailed as a great success.
Questions about the Florida raids resurfaced during Jackson's presidency. In 1830, a rift opened up between President Jackson and his vice president, John C. Calhoun. One of the issues involved Jackson's prior conduct in Florida and Calhoun's reaction as secretary of war. At the time of the invasion, Jackson claimed that he had received secret instructions from Monroe to occupy Florida. Weeks before his death, Monroe wrote a letter disclaiming any knowledge of the secret instructions that Jackson claimed he had received.
Monroe Doctrine
During much of his administration, Monroe was engaged in diplomacy with Spain regarding its Latin American colonies. These lands had begun to break free from Spain in the early 1800s, gaining the sympathy of the United States, which viewed these later revolutions as reminiscent of its own struggle against Britain. Although many in Congress were eager to recognize the independence of the Latin American colonies, the President feared that doing so might risk war with Spain and its allies. It was not until March 1822 that Monroe officially recognized the countries of Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico.
At the same time, rumors abounded that Spain's allies might help the once vast empire reclaim its lost colonies. To counter the planned move, Britain proposed a joint U.S.-British declaration against European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of State Adams convinced Monroe that if the United States issued a joint statement, it would look like the United States was simply adopting Britain's policy without formulating one tailored to its own interests. The United States, he argued, should devise its own strategy to address European intervention in the Western Hemisphere.
On December 2, 1823, in his annual message to Congress, President Monroe addressed the subject in three parts. He first reiterated the traditional U.S. policy of neutrality with regard to European wars and conflicts. He then declared that the United States would not accept the recolonization of any country by its former European master, though he also avowed non-interference with existing European colonies in the Americas. Finally, he stated that European countries should no longer consider the Western Hemisphere open to new colonization, a jab aimed primarily at Russia, which was attempting to expand its colony on the northern Pacific Coast.
This statement, which in the 1850s came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, sounded tough, but most countries knew that America had little ability to back it up with force. Nevertheless, because Britain had also favored Monroe's policy, the United States was able to "free ride" on the back of the Royal Navy. In addition, London had extracted a promise from Paris that France would not assist Spain in the recovery of its colonies.
The Monroe Doctrine constituted the first significant policy statement by the United States on the future of the Western Hemisphere. As befitting the leader of a nation founded on the principles of republican government, Monroe saw the United States as a model and protector to the new Latin American republics. His declared intention to resist further European encroachment in the Western Hemisphere was the foundation of U.S. policy in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remains one of Monroe's lasting achievements.
Monroe decided to follow the precedent set by Washington, Jefferson, and Madison and serve only two terms as President. His decision meant that an incumbent would not be running for the post in 1824. During the last few years of Monroe's tenure, some of his initiatives were defeated or delayed simply because of the maneuverings of those looking forward to the 1824 election. The main contenders during that campaign season were Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Secretary of Treasury William H. Crawford, Representative Henry Clay, and Senator Andrew Jackson. Monroe declared his intention to remain neutral during the election and did not endorse any candidate.
Following the inauguration of John Quincy Adams as President in 1825, Monroe remained in the White House for three weeks because his wife was too ill to travel. The couple then retired to their estate, Oak Hill, in Loudoun County, Virginia. Monroe was glad to be relieved of the exhausting duties of the presidency. At Oak Hill, he enjoyed spending time with his family and overseeing the activities of his farm.
During much of his later life, Monroe worked to resolve his financial difficulties. He had long served publicly in positions that paid mediocre salaries and demanded expenditures for entertaining and protocol. Consequently, Monroe was deeply in debt when he left the presidency. For the next several years, he spent much of his time pressing the federal government for tens of thousands of dollars due him from past services. Eventually the federal government repaid Monroe a portion of the funds he desired, allowing him to pay off his debts and leave his children a respectable inheritance.
In 1826, Monroe accepted appointment to the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia. He was deeply committed to the university—founded by his friend Thomas Jefferson—and served on the board until he became too ill to continue. In 1829, he became president of the Virginia Constitutional Convention.
After struggling to complete a book comparing the U.S. government to the governments of ancient and modern nations, he abandoned the project and started work on his autobiography. It became the major focus of his later years, but he never completed it. Following his wife's death in 1830, Monroe, age seventy-two, moved to New York City to live with his daughter and son-in-law.
In the early spring of 1831, Monroe's health steadily declined. He died that year on July 4, in New York City. Monroe was the third of the first five Presidents to die on the Fourth of July; John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on that day five years earlier. Thousands of mourners followed his hearse up Broadway in Manhattan to the Gouverneur family vault in Marble Cemetery, while church bells tolled and guns fired at Fort Columbus. Monroe's body was later moved to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.
While a delegate to the Continental Congress in New York, James Monroe met Elizabeth Kortright in 1785. They were married the following year and eventually had three children—Eliza Kortright Monroe, James Spence Monroe (who died in infancy), and Maria Hester Monroe. Despite Monroe’s many trips abroad, he spent precious little time away from his family, since they usually accompanied him on his travels.
The Monroes were devoted parents and gave much attention to their daughters. James believed education was important for girls as well as boys, and his daughters were well-educated for the era. Even after the marriages of their daughters, James and Elizabeth remained in close contact with them and were fond of both their sons-in-law. Indeed, for a time, Eliza and her husband lived in the White House with her parents, and she served as White House hostess when her mother was unwell. After Elizabeth's death in 1830, James and Eliza moved to New York City to live with Maria and her family.
During Monroe's presidency, five new states had joined the Union: Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), Maine (1820), and Missouri (1821). Twenty-five percent of the American population was living west of the Appalachians by 1820. According to the Land Act of 1820, farmers could buy eighty acres at $1.25 per acre with a down-payment of $100 in cash. At such prices, nearly 3.5 million acres of land were purchased in 1820 alone, although not all of these sales reflected actual settlement. Land speculation in the West was uncontrolled, as wealthy investors bought giant tracts for resale to farmers and migrants. For these western settlers, the major political issues reflected their need for easy credit to clear the land, good transportation routes to move their products to market, debt relief, and cheap manufactured goods for them to consume.
Although the new states gave a western slant to American politics, most of the settlers still tended to identify with the regions from which they had recently migrated. Importantly, most Americans still thought of themselves as Americans first. With this strongly nationalist temperament, most Americans were swept up in the changes in transportation that began to revolutionize travel and the movement of goods, as well as by the effects of the so-called market revolution. By 1820, there were sixty steamboats on the Mississippi River alone; dozens more operated on the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. James Monroe was the first President to travel on a steamboat, which he did in 1817. That year, Monroe's first as President, the New York legislature authorized funding to build a canal linking the Hudson River with Lake Erie, thus opening a continuous water route connecting the Northwest to New York City. The Erie Canal, a giant ditch stretching 364 miles from Albany to Buffalo that was completed in 1825, was built by thousands of Irish immigrants, local farm boys, and convict laborers.
Economic Changes
In New England, a new system of factories, using steam-driven looms, began employing thousands of local farm girls in the production of cloth. In the New England countryside, moreover, farmers began raising livestock and consuming store-bought goods such as sugar, salt, coffee, sacks of western flour, silverware, and dishes. Urban centers of industry were also being transformed. New York City, for example, became the center of a national market of ready-made clothes in the 1820s. The city's manufacturing success was built upon the new supplies of cheap cloth, an expanding supply of female labor, and the emergence of southern and western markets that were accessible via coastal and overland trade routes. Thousands of women worked in sewing to crudely assemble "Negro cottons" for shipment to southern planters as slave clothing. By 1825, shoemakers in Massachusetts manufactured barrels of shoes—uniform in size—for shipment to the slave South.
Below the Mason-Dixon surveyor's line, which separated the borders of the slave South from the North, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had revolutionized southern agriculture. By the mid-1820s, cotton and plantation slavery were beginning to dominate the most fertile lands stretching from Georgia to Mississippi. Wealthy planters lived in richly furnished plantation mansions and had begun to create a lifestyle of white mastery over black slaves that shaped every aspect of southern life.
As the market revolution transformed subsistence farmers into commercial farmers who specialized in crops for sale, the average size of the American family began to decline from 6.4 children to 4.9 children; this was especially noticeable in the more commercialized farming areas of the North. Also, women began to labor more intensively in new kinds of household work. Store-purchased white flour and new iron stoves created demands for home-baked cakes, pies, and other fancy goods that had rarely graced the subsistence farmer's table prior to 1820. More and more farm families kept cleaner houses, painted them, and forbade spitting tobacco on parlor floors.
James Monroe came to the presidency as one of the most qualified men ever to assume the office. His resume included service in the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress, and the U.S. Senate. Monroe also served as governor of Virginia, filled numerous diplomatic posts, and held two cabinet appointments. His success as a politician was the result of hard work and a steady and thoughtful manner. He was noted for his integrity, frankness, and affable personality, and he impressed those whom he met with his lack of pretension. As President, Monroe saw the country through a transition period in which it turned away from European affairs and toward U.S. domestic issues.
During the negotiations that resulted in the Missouri Compromise, his adroit backstage maneuverings help the country avoid a sectional crisis. His administration had a number of successes in foreign affairs, including the acquisition of Florida, the settlement of boundary issues with Britain, and the fashioning of the Monroe Doctrine. The President's relationship with his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was vital in each of these cases. The two men had a respect and admiration for each other that led to a successful working rapport. In fact, Monroe had an ability to assemble great minds and then allow them the freedom to work. Scholars have long regarded his cabinet as an exceptionally strong one.
As President, Monroe occasionally suffers from comparison to the other members of the Virginia Dynasty—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Indeed, he was not a renaissance man like Jefferson; his overwhelming interest and passion was politics. But he was a deliberate thinker and had the ability to look at issues from all sides, encouraging debate from his advisers. President Monroe was a great advocate of nationalism and reached out to all the regions of the country. In foreign policy, he put the nation on an independent course, no longer tied to the mast of European policy. Although the nation would have to wait until Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to see a significant increase in presidential power over domestic affairs, Monroe's aggressive and successful conduct of foreign policy undoubtedly strengthened the presidency itself.
Reared for public service, John Quincy Adams became one of the nation's preeminent secretaries of state but proved the wrong man for the presidency. Aloof, stubborn, and ferociously independent, he failed to develop the support he needed in Washington, even among his own party. Faced throughout his term with organized opposition from the Democrats—who were committed to limiting Adams to a single term and replacing him with Andrew Jackson—Adams refused to forge the political alliances necessary to push his ideas into policy. His father, President John Adams, had also ignored the political side of the office and served only one term. History repeated itself with his son: John Quincy Adams lost his reelection bid to Jackson in 1828.
Worldly Upbringing
John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767, the son of a father who would serve in the Continental Congress and helped draft the Declaration of Independence. When John Quincy was ten, his father was posted to Europe as a special envoy of the revolutionary American government, and John Quincy accompanied him. For the boy, it was an incredible introduction to the courts of Europe and the practice of diplomacy. For seven years, except for a few months back in Massachusetts, John Quincy lived in Paris, Amsterdam, and St. Petersburg. He was a student at the University of Leiden for about a year when, because of his excellence in French, he was asked to serve as secretary and translator for Francis Dana, posted as emissary to St. Petersburg from 1781 to 1783. John Quincy returned to Paris in 1783 to serve as secretary to his father through the negotiation of peace ending the American Revolutionary War and, in 1785, returned home to complete his education at Harvard College. He graduated two years later. During this period, John Quincy began keeping a diary, and he maintained it from 1779 until 1848, shortly before he died. Admitted to the bar in 1790, Adams practiced law in Boston. In 1794, President George Washington appointed him minister to the Netherlands, where he served with distinction until 1797. He also reencountered the woman he would marry, Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of an American merchant living abroad. Adams had first met Louisa in France when he was twelve. For months while in London on diplomatic assignment, Adams visited her family nightly, always leaving when the daughters sat down at the piano to play and sing—he disliked the sound of the female voice in song. Despite his taste in music and some reservations from his parents who did not think his son should have a foreign-born wife, the two were married in 1797.
Political Trials and Tribulations
After an assignment as the minister to Prussia from 1797 to 1801, Adams returned home and won election to the Massachusetts legislature. In 1803, the legislature appointed him to the United States Senate (senators were not chosen by popular vote until 1913). As a senator, he supported Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase, one of only two Federalists to do so, and also endorsed other Democratic-Republican projects, including the Embargo Act of 1807. These actions led the Federalist-dominated Massachusetts legislature to decline to return him to the Senate, and Adams immediately resigned his post. He then switched his allegiance to the Democratic-Republican Party.
In 1809, President James Madison named him the first U.S. minister to Russia and later also assigned him to head the five-person delegation empowered to negotiate a peace agreement ending the War of 1812. The treaty, universally seen as a victory for the young American nation, was signed on December 24, 1814, and Adams was subsequently posted to the English court for two years.
With the election of James Monroe to the presidency, Adams came home to become secretary of state, arguably his period of greatest accomplishment. He played a major role in formulating the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European nations not to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. He also negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty with Spain, which extended U.S. boundaries to the Pacific Ocean and ceded Florida to the United States. During his eight years as secretary of state, he built a powerful and efficient American diplomatic service.
Bitter Fight for the White House
In the presidential election of 1824, four men campaigned: former Secretary of War William H. Crawford of Georgia, House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky, General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, and John Quincy Adams. All were nominally Democratic-Republicans, and Crawford won the party's congressional caucus nomination, but at a time when the caucus system was being called into question as undemocratic. The 1824 presidential election was a landmark one, the first in which popular vote actually mattered. Eighteen states had moved to choose presidential electors by popular vote while six still left the choice up to the state legislature. After a fierce campaign, Jackson took a plurality in the popular vote, followed, in order, by Adams, Clay, and Crawford. In the electoral college, however, Jackson had thirty-two votes fewer than he needed to prevail. Acting under the Twelfth Amendment, the House of Representatives met to select the President. Speaker of the House Clay threw his support behind Adams and gave him the election by a single vote. Soon thereafter, Adams named Clay secretary of state. It was a bad beginning for the Adams presidency. Jackson resigned from the Senate and vowed to unseat Adams in 1828.
Adams believed strongly that it was constitutional and appropriate for the federal government to sponsor broad programs to improve American society and prosperity. He backed Henry Clay's proposed "American System," envisioning a national marketplace in which North and South, town and country, were tied together by trade and exchange. To realize this vision, Adams proposed to Congress an ambitious program involving the construction of roads, canals, educational institutions, and other initiatives. Lacking congressional allies, however, Adams was unable to maneuver most of these programs into law. Congress also blocked many of his foreign initiatives. His support of the so-called Tariff of Abominations of 1828, which protected American interests but caused higher prices, cost him popularity among the voters.
By 1828, Andrew Jackson had been campaigning for three years. He characterized Adams's election as a "corrupt bargain" typical of the elitist eastern "gamesters." Following a campaign marred by vicious personal attacks—Jackson's wife was called an adulteress, Adams was accused of procuring prostitutes for the Russian czar—Jackson won in a landslide.
Post-White House Career
John Quincy Adams had one of the most politically active post-presidencies of any U.S. President. Two years after his defeat, Adams ran for Congress from his home district in Massachusetts. He accepted the nomination on two conditions: that he would never solicit their votes and that he would follow his conscience at all times. He served nine consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, earning the nickname "Old Man Eloquent" because of his extraordinary speeches in opposition to slavery. He was instrumental in ending the "gag rule" that prohibited debate on slavery in the House of Representatives and also continued to champion internal improvements for the country. Historically, Adams has won more acclaim for this long congressional career than for his presidency. He suffered a stroke on the floor of the House on February 21, 1848, and died two days later.
John Quincy Adams was born on July 11, 1767, in the village of Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, a few miles south of Boston. His early years were spent living alternately in Braintree and Boston, and his doting father and affectionate mother taught him mathematics, languages, and the classics. His father, John Adams, had been politically active for all of John Quincy's life, but the calling of the First Continental Congress in 1774 marked a new stage in John Adams' activism. The older Adams would go on to help lead the Continental Congress, draft the Declaration of Independence, and oversee the execution of the Revolutionary War. He was also absent from his children's lives more often than he was present, leaving much of their raising and education to their mother, Abigail.
In the first year of the war, young John Quincy Adams feared for the life of his father and worried that the British might take his family hostage. Indeed, when John Adams signed his name to the Declaration of Independence, he committed an act of treason against England, an offense punishable by death. For John Quincy, these years were actually the beginning of his manhood, and he recalled later in life feeling responsible—as the eldest son—for protecting his mother while his father attended to the business of revolution. John Quincy witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill with his mother from the top of one of the Braintree hills and regularly saw soldiers passing through his hometown. The Revolutionary War was not some distant, theoretical event but an immediate and frightening reality.
Grooming for the World Stage
From ages ten to seventeen, Adams experienced an incredible European adventure that prepared him for his later career in the foreign service of his country. In late 1777, John Adams was posted to Europe as a special envoy, and in 1778, John Quincy accompanied him to Paris. Over the next seven years, John Quincy would spend time in Paris, the Netherlands, and St. Petersburg, with shorter visits to England, Sweden, and Prussia. The young Adams experienced his first formal schooling at the Passy Academy outside of Paris where—together with the grandsons of Benjamin Franklin—he studied fencing, dance, music, and art. The Adamses remained in France for a little over a year and then returned home for some three months.
When John Adams was again posted to Europe in November 1779, tasked with negotiating the peace with Britain, he returned with his sons John Quincy and Charles, reaching Paris in February 1780 after a harrowing journey in first a leaky ship, then overland on mules from Spain. John, recognizing that there was little likelihood of peace negotiations, decided in the summer of 1780 to relocate to Amsterdam along with his sons, both of whom briefly attended the University of Leiden. Charles proved unhappy in Europe and was sent home after a year and a half. Around the same time in 1781, John Quincy's education was interrupted when Francis Dana, the newly appointed U.S. emissary to St. Petersburg, asked that John Quincy, then fourteen years old, accompany him as translator and personal secretary. A year later, John Quincy traveled alone for five months from St. Petersburg to The Hague, the Dutch seat of government, to rejoin his father. When he returned to America in 1785, Adams enrolled in Harvard College as an advanced student, completing his studies in two years.
After college, Adams studied law and passed the Massachusetts bar exam in the summer of 1790. While preparing for the law exam, he mastered shorthand and read everything in sight, from ancient history to popular literature. He especially enjoyed the humorous novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, which he deemed "one of the best novels in the language." Always in awe of Thomas Jefferson, a close friend of his father and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Adams considered Jefferson's Notes on Virginia a brilliant piece of writing.
As a young man, Adams stood apart from his age group. He took no part in the usual college pranks nor did he think much of his teachers—many of whom were less well read and had less worldly experience than he had. But Adams did have an appreciative eye for young women. His first love, at age fourteen, was a French actress whom he never met personally but dreamed about after seeing her stage performance. During his legal apprenticeship, John Quincy fell deeply in love with a young woman he met in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he was studying law. The romance lasted for several months before his mother, Abigail Adams, persuaded him to put off marriage until he could afford to support a wife. John Quincy agreed, and the two drifted apart. It was a parting that he always regretted, but it demonstrated a character trait in Adams that accompanied him throughout his life: his respect for the opinions of his parents.
From 1790 to 1794, Adams practiced law with little success in Boston. As a new, young lawyer competing for clients with far more established and senior men, he had difficulty attracting paying clients. Not even the fact that his father was now vice president of the United States seemed to help. When not practicing law, Adams wrote articles in support of the Washington administration and debated the political issues of the day with his fellow lawyers. Finally, in 1794, just as John Quincy's law career was beginning to make headway, President George Washington, appreciative of the young Adams's support for his administration and aware of his fluency in French and Dutch, appointed him minister to the Netherlands. It was a good time for the young diplomat. He carefully managed the repayment of Dutch loans made to America during the American Revolution and sent well-regarded official reports to Washington on the aftermath of the French Revolution.
A Moody Suitor
While traveling in France as a young boy, John met Louisa Catherine, the four-year-old daughter of Joshua Johnson, an American merchant who had married an Englishwoman and was then living in Nantes, France. Years later, in 1797, when Louisa had grown into a pretty 22-year-old woman, she and Adams met again. Now he was a 30-year-old diplomat and the son of the President of the United States. She was living in London, where her father served as the American consul, and Adams had been sent to London from The Hague to exchange the ratifications of the Jay Treaty. The Johnson family provided the social center for Americans in London, and Adams regularly visited. In time, he began to court Louisa, dining nightly with the family but always leaving when the girls began to sing after the evening meal—Adams disliked the sound of the female voice in song. Louisa found herself intrigued by her moody suitor. The two were married on July 26, 1797, over the initial objections of Adams's parents, who did not think it wise for a future President to have a foreign-born wife.
Right around the time of their marriage, John Quincy was appointed U.S. minister to Prussia, where he remained until his father lost his reelection bid for a second term as President in 1800. The Adamses returned to the United States in 1801 with their son George Washington Adams, and John Quincy threw himself into local politics, winning election to the state senate. Then the Massachusetts legislature appointed him to the U.S. Senate in 1803.
Career in Diplomacy
As the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, he shifted from his nominally Federalist position to support the Democratic-Republican administration of President Thomas Jefferson. He supported the Louisiana Purchase, one of only two Federalists to do so, and the imposition of the Embargo Act of 1807 against foreign trade. In 1808, the Federalist-controlled Massachusetts state legislature was infuriated by Adams's pro-Jeffersonian conduct and expressed their displeasure by appointing Adams's successor nearly a full year before Adams's term was complete. Adams promptly resigned and subsequently changed his party affiliation from Federalist to Democratic-Republican.
Shortly after the loss of his Senate seat, President James Madison appointed Adams the first U.S. minister to Russia. Although Adams had previously expressed negative feelings about Russia as a nation of "slaves and princes," he soon developed a strong personal attachment to Czar Alexander, whom he admired for his willingness to stand up to Napoleon. While in Russia, Adams persuaded the czar to allow American ships to trade in Russian ports, and when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Adams's dispatches home provided Madison with detailed and perceptive accounts of the war.
In 1814, President Madison appointed Adams to head a five-person delegation to negotiate a peace agreement ending the War of 1812 with Britain. It was an auspicious group of Americans who met in Ghent, Belgium: Special Envoy John Quincy Adams, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and U.S. Minister to Sweden Jonathan Russell. The treaty negotiations took five months, resulting in an agreement to end the fighting and restore all territory to the status quo at the beginning of the war. No mention was made of the issues that had started the war, such as the impressment of American seamen or the rights of neutral commerce. Still, the treaty was a significant victory for the United States: the young nation had engaged the greatest military power in the world without conceding anything in return for peace. The treaty was signed on December 24, 1814, two weeks prior to the great victory of U.S. forces over the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Word did not reach America of the treaty until mid-February, and the Senate ratified it unanimously on February 17, 1815.
Madison subsequently posted Adams to England for two years. With the election of James Monroe as President, Adams accepted appointment as secretary of state, serving from 1817 to 1825. During his long tenure as head of the State Department, he compiled an impressive record of diplomatic accomplishments. At the top of the list stands his role in formulating the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European nations not to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Although Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had advised President Monroe to issue the proclamation in a joint statement with Britain, Adams—understanding the diplomatic symbolism involved—persuaded Monroe to make a unilateral and independent statement as a mark of U.S. sovereignty in the hemisphere.
Secretary of State Adams also successfully negotiated U.S. fishing rights off the Canadian coast, established the present U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rockies, formulated a pragmatic policy for the recognition of newly independent Latin American nations, and achieved the transfer of Spanish Florida to the United States in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. This treaty also fixed the southwestern boundary of the United States at the Sabine River (in present-day Texas) and removed Spanish claims to Oregon. Adams also halted Russian claims to Oregon. Within the State Department, he appointed staff on the basis of merit rather than patronage, and upon his election as President in 1824, he left behind a highly efficient diplomatic service with clear accountability procedures and a system of regularized correspondence in place.
The Campaign and Election of 1824:
Although John Quincy Adams should have been the heir apparent to the presidency as James Monroe's secretary of state, the year 1824 was a political turning point in which none of the old rules applied. Four other men also wanted to be President, each with substantial regional backing. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had served as secretary of war in the Monroe administration and had support from slave owners in the South but he needed support from outside the region to be a viable candidate. The politically ambitious and able William H. Crawford of Georgia enjoyed the support of party regulars in Congress—especially Senator Martin Van Buren of New York—as well as substantial footing in Georgia. Crawford had served as secretary of war and of the treasury in the two previous administrations. His main drawback stemmed from his explosive temper, which had alienated a number of fellow political leaders including President Monroe. The two men had almost engaged in a fistfight in a cabinet meeting before Crawford gathered his wits enough to apologize. Thereafter, the two men seldom spoke to one another.
The most visible candidate was House Speaker Henry Clay. A leading War Hawk during the War of 1812, Clay had a power base in Kentucky, was a gifted public speaker, and had support for his so-called American System of protective tariffs and federally sponsored internal improvements. His high-profile advocacy of these issues made him a familiar name in much of the country. Although he was well known, his clear identification with the war and nationalism weakened his roots in the South, which was beginning to fear supporting anyone for President who was not a slave owner or a supporter of states' rights.
Then there was General Andrew Jackson from Tennessee, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson's reputation as an Indian fighter and western expansionist, owing to his military escapades in Spanish Florida (see Jackson biography, Life Before the Presidency section), gave him national standing above all other candidates. It also helped that Jackson could enter the race as an outsider, a defender of the Republic who had risked his life in service of his nation. In fact, his supporters talked about him as another George Washington. Few experienced politicians, however, expected Jackson to win if any of the opposing candidates could broker a cross-regional coalition that would unite either the West or the South with New England or the mid-Atlantic States.
Such a coalition was no easy task to achieve. After all, the 1824 election occurred in a day and age when a new political electorate composed of regionally focused voters had only recently been empowered with the franchise. Since 1820, the old political caucus method by which the congressional leaders nominated presidential candidates had fallen into disrepute. This was principally because the old caucus system failed to connect with the wishes of the new voters, the tens of thousands of males who had been enfranchised by the removal of property ownership as a criterion for white male suffrage. This new climate looked to regional endorsements of candidates by state conventions or state assemblies, which meant that regional popularity, rather than congressional intrigue, would drive the nomination process.
Although Adams was a centrist politician of sorts—a Jeffersonian-Federalist, to coin a new term—many Americans still identified him as a New Englander and as the son of the old Federalist leader John Adams. Additionally, many staunch Democratic-Republicans blamed Adams and his supporters for having transformed the party of Jefferson into a disguised form of Federalism under the rubric of "National Republicans." Southerners, moreover, objected to Adams because of his moral opposition to slavery. They remembered his criticism of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a proslavery conspiracy, and they suspiciously recalled Adams's efforts to include language opposed to the international slave trade in the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812.
Four Democratic-Republican Candidates
In the summer of 1824, an unofficial caucus of less than a third of the congressmen eligible to attend nominated Crawford for President. Supporters for Adams denounced the caucus bid, and the Massachusetts legislature nominated Adams as their favorite-son candidate. The Kentucky legislature did the same for Clay. Both nominations followed the pattern set by the Tennessee legislature, which had nominated Andrew Jackson in 1822. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina dropped out of the presidential race by announcing his bid for the vice presidency, a move that both Adams and Crawford endorsed. Because all four candidates were nominal Democratic-Republicans—the Federalist Party had disintegrated by this point—the election would be decided without reference to party affiliation.
As the campaign progressed, Jackson emerged as the man to beat. The size of his rallies in key swing states—Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, New York, and New Jersey—far surpassed or rivaled those for Clay and Adams. In this first election in American history in which the popular vote mattered—because eighteen states chose presidential electors by popular vote in 1824 (six states still left the choice up to their state legislatures) —Jackson's popularity foretold a new era in the making. When the final votes were tallied in those eighteen states, Jackson polled 152,901 popular votes to Adams's 114,023; Clay won 47,217, and Crawford won 46,979. The electoral college returns, however, gave Jackson only 99 votes, 32 fewer than he needed for a majority of the total votes cast. Adams won 84 electoral votes followed by 41 for Crawford and 37 for Clay.
Jackson was the only candidate to attract significant support beyond his regional base. He carried the majority of electoral votes in eleven states: Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Adams won all six of the New England states plus New York. Crawford and Clay carried only three states each—Delaware, Georgia, and Virginia for Crawford and Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio for Clay.
Acting under the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution, the House of Representatives met to select the President from among the top three candidates. Henry Clay, as the candidate with the fewest electoral votes, was eliminated from the deliberation. As Speaker of the House, however, Clay was still the most important player in determining the outcome of the election. The election in the House took place in February 1825. With each state having one vote, as determined by the wishes of the majority of each state's congressional representatives, Adams emerged as the winner with a one-vote margin of victory. Most of Clay's supporters, joined by several old Federalists, switched their votes to Adams in enough states to give him the election. Soon after his inauguration as President, Adams appointed Henry Clay as his secretary of state.
A "Corrupt Bargain"?
Jackson could barely contain his fury at having lost the election in what he claimed was a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay to overturn the will of the people. To most Jackson supporters, it looked as if congressional leaders had conspired to revive the caucus system, whereby Congress greatly influenced—if not determined—the selection of the President. Jackson laid the blame on Clay, telling anyone who would listen that the Speaker had approached him with the offer of a deal: Clay would support Jackson in return for Jackson's appointment of Clay as secretary of state. When Jackson refused, Clay purportedly made the deal with Adams instead. In Jackson's words, Clay had sold his influence in a "corrupt bargain."
Clay denied the charges, and while there certainly had been some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Clay to push the vote to Adams, it most likely reflected Clay's genuine doubts about Jackson's qualifications for the office. In assessing the odds of successfully forwarding his own political agenda, Clay questioned Jackson's commitment to the "American System" of internal improvements. On the other hand, Clay knew that Adams had supported it consistently over the years. Also, the loss of three states that Jackson had won in the popular vote—Illinois, Maryland, and Louisiana—due to the defection of congressmen who supported Adams suggests that more was involved in the outcome than the political maneuvering of one man. Enraged, Jackson resigned his seat in the Senate and vowed to win the presidency in 1828 as an outsider to Washington politics.
The Campaign and Election of 1828
Within months of Adams's inauguration in 1825, the Tennessee legislature nominated Andrew Jackson for President. Over the next three years, Jackson put together a highly disciplined grassroots campaign with one goal: to defeat John Quincy Adams in a rematch that would pit "the people" against Adams. Jackson issued so-called memorandums (a misuse of the word that endeared him to his growing western constituency) in which he outlined the erosion of representative power over the last decades at the hands of "gamesters" like Clay and Adams. In Jackson's mind, the "corrupt bargain" was just one of a number of such schemes. Jackson claimed that the Panic of 1819, a devastating economic collapse, had resulted from (1) a conspiracy of disreputable creditors and the Bank of the United States, (2) the unpaid national debt, (3) the political swindlers in office from Madison through Adams—schemers who would be turned out with a Jackson victory—and (4) the backstairs dealings of "King Caucus" to select a President in defiance of popular opinion.
While Jackson issued his statements and traveled the nation rounding up support, his most brilliant lieutenant, Martin Van Buren of New York, assumed the duties of a campaign manager. Van Buren had switched allegiance from Crawford to Jackson shortly after the election of 1824. His efforts thereafter were focused on securing a victory for Jackson in the popular vote. Van Buren's strategy was to portray Jackson as the head of a disciplined and issue-oriented party that was committed to states' rights and the limited-government ideology of the old Jeffersonian Republicans.
In the year before the 1828 election, Van Buren's organizational efforts began to create a new political entity that would come to fruition in the 1830s. For the 1828 election, Van Buren focused on linking the opponents of federalism in the North and South into a coalition that he envisioned as the heir to the old Jeffersonian Republican Party. In his mind, victory for this new movement would protect slavery in the South, ensure the legitimacy of majority rule based upon direct voting for candidates by the electorate, and guarantee preservation of the Union, with states' rights as the fundamental basis of American liberty. When he won the support of Vice President John C. Calhoun and powerful Virginia political leaders, Van Buren effectively laid the basis for a party system that would endure until the Civil War. (Calhoun was moving away from his postwar ideology of nationalism to a states' rights conservatism that was more reflective of his region's fear of abolitionism, costly internal improvements, and high protective tariffs.)
While Jackson and Van Buren organized, Adams diligently carried out the duties of the presidency, refusing to prepare himself or his supporters for the coming contest. Adams did not remove even his loudest opponents from appointive office and hewed to the old-fashioned notion that a candidate should "stand" for office, not "run." When the election campaign officially began, Adams's supporters formally adopted the name National Republicans in contrast to Democrats, trying thereby to identify themselves accurately with the link between old-style federalism and a new nationalistic republicanism. Jacksonians, on the other hand, argued for a new revolutionary movement that rested on a firm faith in majoritarian democracy and states' rights—ideas that were not always compatible.
Personal Campaign Battles
Although issues clearly separated the candidates along lines more distinct than any since the election of 1800, the campaign itself was highly personal. Indeed, it was the first campaign in history to use election materials such as campaign buttons, slogans, posters, tokens, flasks, snuffboxes, medallions, thread boxes, matchboxes, mugs, and fabric images so extensively. Almost all of these campaign trinkets depicted some aspect of the candidate's popular image. Jackson's status as a war hero and frontiersman played far better with the public than Adams's stiff-looking elder statesman stance.
Neither candidate personally campaigned in 1828, but their political followers organized rallies, parades, and demonstrations. In the popular press, the rhetorical attacks reached a level of cruelty and misrepresentation not seen since the election of 1800. Jackson was accused of multiple murders, of extreme personal violence, and of having lived in sin with his wife, Rachel, who herself was attacked as a bigamist. Adams, on the other hand, was attacked for his legalistic attitudes, for his foreign-born wife, and for reportedly having procured young American virgins for the Russian czar as the primary achievement of his diplomatic career. Adams's critics referred to him as "His Excellency" while Jackson came under attack as an ill-mannered, barely civilized, backwoods killer of Indians.
In a masterstroke of popular politics, the Jacksonians made good use of the general's nickname, Old Hickory. He had earned the name because he was reputed to be as tough as hickory wood. To publicize his image, Jackson supporters put hickory poles all over the country, distributed hickory toothpicks and canes, and served up barbecues fired by hickory chips.
The branding of Jackson's wife as an "American Jezebel" and convicted adulteress—because she had married Jackson before her divorce from an earlier marriage had been finalized—surprisingly backfired as an election strategy. It unleashed a backlash against Adams for humiliating a woman who had lived for 40 years as the devoted wife of General Jackson, for grossly violating the general's privacy and honor, and for applying narrowly legalistic pronouncements in place of common sense. To countless Americans, Jackson's duels, brawls, executions, and unauthorized ventures represented the victory of what was right and good over the application of stiff-minded and narrowly construed principles. The attacks simply enhanced Jackson's image as an authentic American hero who had drawn upon his natural nobility and powerful will to prevail against unscrupulous political foes, educated elitists, the pride of the British army, and "heathen savages"—often at the same time.
The campaign turned out more than twice the number of voters who had cast ballots in 1824—approximately 57 percent of the electorate. Jackson won the election in a landslide, and by a wide margin of 95 electoral votes. Adams carried New England, Delaware, part of Maryland, New Jersey, and sixteen of New York's electoral votes—nine states in all. Jackson carried the remaining fifteen states of the South, Northwest, mid-Atlantic, and West. Incumbent Vice President John C. Calhoun won 171 electoral votes to 83 for Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, Adams's running mate.
The "American System":
President John Quincy Adams wholeheartedly supported the role of the federal government in the sponsorship of projects and institutions designed to improve the conditions of society. He had no constitutional doubts about the authority of the President and Congress to construct a system of internal improvements, ranging from roads and canals to harbors, bridges, and other public works. In this, he supported the "American System" first proposed by Henry Clay while Clay was Speaker of the House. The general plan rested upon the notion of a self-sufficient, but regionally specialized, national economy. Both Adams and Clay believed that a factory-based northern economy would provide markets for southern cotton and western foodstuffs. In exchange, the South and West would purchase northern manufactured goods. Alexander Hamilton had proposed a similar idea in the 1790s, only to be blocked by southern opponents who believed that such a national economic network of interdependent parts would enhance the power of the federal government.
In his first annual message to Congress, President Adams presented an ambitious program for the creation of a national market that included roads, canals, a national university, a national astronomical observatory, and other initiatives. Many congressmen, even his supporters, had trouble with his proposals. His critics challenged the supposed arrogance of a President who had been narrowly elected by the House. In their minds, Adams was not entitled to act as though he had received a national mandate for action. They mockingly criticized his observatories as Adams's "lighthouses of the skies." Others pointed out that the President's internal improvements would benefit some parts of the nation more than others and bring the federal government into regional affairs. Nevertheless, through the use of military engineers for survey and construction operations, public land grants, and governmental subscription to corporate stock issues, the administration achieved considerable progress in support of harbor improvement and road and canal development. Some of the specific projects included extending the Cumberland Road into Ohio with surveys for its continuation west to St. Louis, beginning the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, constructing the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal and the Portland to Louisville Canal around the falls of the Ohio, connecting the Great Lakes to the Ohio River system in Ohio and Indiana, and enlarging and rebuilding the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina.
The Tariff of Abominations
Henry Clay's ardor in support of protective tariffs was well known, but there was considerable uncertainty regarding Adams's views. His New England constituency was divided between long-standing concern for promotion of foreign commerce and newly developing interest in protection of domestic industry. A further complication was the fact that administration supporters had lost control of Congress in the election of 1826. Senator Martin Van Buren had supported William H. Crawford for the presidency in 1824, opposed Adams's election, and remained hostile to the administration throughout Adams's tenure. Recognizing the divisions that marked the Adams administration's position on the tariff, Van Buren led a campaign designed to set high tariffs to protect mid-Atlantic and western agricultural interests—levies on raw wool, flax, molasses, hemp, and distilled spirits. In the end, Congress forced Adams to accept a stricter tariff than he would have preferred by refusing to consider more moderate proposals. Adams had to choose between a stringently protective tariff or no tariff at all, and Adams accepted the former.
The Tariff of 1828 had new rates that were particularly restrictive of textile imports and damaging to a market of British manufacturers upon whom southern planters were dependent. One southern legislature after another denounced the tariff as unconstitutional, unjust, and oppressive, and the Virginia legislature called it the "Tariff of Abominations." (See Jackson biography, Domestic Affairs section, for a more detailed discussion of this tariff, which required implementation after Adams left office.) Vice President Calhoun's opposition was so strong, he condemned the tariff and drafted the South Carolina Exposition, asserting the right of a state to nullify federal laws that were obviously harmful to state interests.