The election of 1824 could be seen as a constitutional success story. Notwithstanding the electoral stalemate produced on Election Day, and the passions of the day, the process played out quickly and bloodlessly, producing a president in keeping with established procedures. However, there are several reasons to regard that process as severely flawed.
First, we ended up with a president who lacked popular support. Less than one-third of the voters nationwide chose Adams. Of course, the Electoral College creates an inherent risk of a candidate winning despite receiving fewer votes than another candidate. Rather than pick our president through a single election, we aggregate the results of winner-take-all elections in each state (with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, which award one electoral vote to the winner of the state’s congressional districts, as well as two to the statewide winner). Under this system, one can win the presidency despite receiving fewer votes than one’s opponent simply by winning a few large states with many electoral votes while losing other states by greater margins. Or, as in 1824, a candidate who receives the greatest number of popular votes and electoral votes may fail to win a majority of the latter, sending the election to the House.
On five occasions in U.S. history—1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016—the candidate who received the most votes was not elected The most extreme case was 1824. Samuel Tilden lost the nationwide popular vote by 3 percent in 1876; Benjamin Harrison by 1 percent in 1888; George W. Bush by half a percentage point in 2000; and Donald Trump by 2 percent in 2016. By contrast, Adams received 38,000 votes fewer than Jackson out of 360,000 cast, a 10 percent gap. In modern parlance, he lost by a landslide. Moreover, unlike the winners in those other four elections, Adams received fewer electoral votes and popular votes than his opponent. His elevation to the presidency seems anti-democratic by almost any definition.54
Second, although things did play out reasonably swiftly and free of violence, the chance for chaos and popular upheaval loomed. Jackson supporters did not make good on their threat to revolt, but the very fact that such threats were made is sobering.
Third, the election in 1824 was decided by what many regarded as a “corrupt bargain.” The widespread suspicion undercut confidence in U.S. democracy. In the run-up to the House vote, Adams himself expressed concern that, if it were perceived that he prevailed because of a deal with Clay, “the people would be so disgusted with this that there would be a systematic and determined opposition from the beginning, so that the Administration could not get along.”55 He proved prophetic. Adams received little cooperation from Jackson supporters in Congress and, in 1828, lost his rematch to Jackson decisively.
Assuming that Adams and Clay did strike a deal, was it in fact corrupt? On the one hand, for a politician to support a candidate for office in expectation (or even an explicit promise) of a position in his administration could be seen as time-honored horse trading. However, the notion that someone achieves the presidency because another candidate offers his support to the highest bidder seems obviously problematic. In the case of 1824, the easiest resolution of this dilemma is to emphasize the covert nature of the deal (if there was one) between Adams and Clay. Even if it was fine for the two to strike a bargain, the American people deserved to know about it. Ditto the Senate that had to determine whether to confirm Clay as secretary of state.
A full consideration of the propriety of the alleged actions of Clay and Adams is beyond the scope of this book. What matters for our purposes is the judgment rendered by the American people, and the fact that the arrangement the people judged harshly came about in large part because of the way we elect a president.
Conversely, Adams’s loss to Jackson in 1828 could be seen as a cleansing election, an antidote to the toxic backroom dealing that put Adams in office in the first place. So too, the corrupt bargain would have been partially thwarted had the Senate chosen not to confirm Clay as secretary of state. Thus, one could look at the election of 1824 and give the Constitution one or two cheers. While it failed to prevent the crisis, it contained corrective mechanisms that could and to some extent did limit the damage. But should we settle for a system that predictably produces crises?
THREE
THE ELECTION OF 1876
In America in 1876, national pride intersected with national insecurity. The year marked the 100th anniversary of U.S. Independence, an event greeted with mass celebration, including the ballyhooed Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a grand display of the nation’s achievements. At the same time, the Civil War, little more than a decade old, remained a vivid reminder of the nation’s flaws and fragility. Moreover, if the centennial served to unite the nation, the ongoing fight over Reconstruction reinforced the nation’s still bitter divisions.
Against that backdrop, Democrats sought to win their first presidential election in forty years, while the Republicans aimed to extend their four consecutive terms in the White House. (There were four Whig Party presidents during the 1840s and ’50s.) The fight for the nomination of both parties was wide open. Unlike the three previous cycles, in which Republicans more or less anointed the incumbent presidents, Lincoln and Grant, they had no prohibitive favorite (given Grant’s intent to step down after two terms, following the precedent established by George Washington and adhered to by every president since). The Democrats, too, lacked a clear front-runner.
The Republican field included three prominent U.S. senators: Maine’s James Blaine, New York’s Roscoe Conkling, and Indiana’s Oliver Morton. Morton, who as governor of Indiana during the Civil War had supplied the Union far more troops than requested, suffered a stroke in 1865 that left him permanently disabled but did not diminish his lust for the presidency. Blaine and Conkling, who sowed the seeds of their candidacies for years, were such bitter enemies that Conkling, asked whether he could imagine supporting Blaine, replied, “I don’t engage in criminal practice.”56 Another Republican candidate, Grant’s secretary of the treasury Benjamin Bristow, was a hero of the liberal wing of the party who advocated less aggressive policies toward the South.
Blaine, who had been Speaker of the House for six years before his recent selection to the Senate, was widely perceived as the front-runner. At the opposite end of the spectrum was dark horse Rutherford B. Hayes. A successful criminal defense attorney (with a degree from Harvard Law School) who had represented a number of escaped slaves and a Union general badly wounded in battle, Hayes was elected to Congress in 1864 and re-elected in 1866, but resigned shortly thereafter to seek the governorship of Ohio. He was elected to that position in 1868, and served two terms before retiring in 1872. However, three years later the Republicans drafted him to run again for governor. No sooner was Hayes again elected to that position than his name began to be bandied about as a long-shot presidential candidate.
In the run-up to the Republican Convention in June in Cincinnati, all of the candidates craved the endorsement of President Grant, and courted him assiduously. The other major activity in the spring of 1876 was the holding of state conventions to select delegates committed to one of the candidates. However, many states opted to eschew the declared candidates and instead support a “favorite son” (their own governor or some other local politician) in order to maintain their flexibility and leverage at the national convention.
Blaine might have been a more commanding favorite if he hadn’t been dogged by charges of corruption, especially the claim that shortly after he was elected to Congress in 1863, he received a $64,000 bribe from Union Pacific Railroad. It wasn’t until 1880, when Blaine again sought his party’s nomination, that Democrats trotted out their famous rallying cry: “James, James, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine.” But questions about Blaine’s probity surfaced throughout the run-up to the 1876 Republican Convention in Cincinnati. A lengthy congressional investigation into his alleged misdeeds was ongoing when, on June 11, while walking