A Brief History of the United States

by John Bach McMaster

FOOTNOTES

[1] James Monroe was a Virginian, born in 1758; he entered William and Mary College, served in the Continental army, was a member of the Virginia Assembly, of the Continental Congress for three years, and of the Virginia convention that adopted the Federal Constitution in 1788. He strongly opposed the adoption of the Constitution. As United States senator (1790- 94), he opposed Washington's administration; but was sent as minister to France (1794-96). In 1799-1802 Monroe was governor of Virginia, and then was sent to France to aid Livingston in the purchase of Louisiana; was minister to Great Britain 1804-6, and in 1811-17 was Secretary of State, and in 1814-15 acted also as Secretary of War. In 1817-25 he was President. He died in 1831.

[2] Monroe carried every state in the Union and was entitled to every electoral vote. But one elector did not vote for him, in order that Washington might still have the honor of being the only President unanimously elected.

[3] In the new Western states were great tracts which belonged to the United States, and which the Western states now asked should be given to them, or at least be sold to them for a few cents an acre. The East opposed this, and asked for gifts of Western land which they might sell so as to use the money to build roads and canals and establish free schools.

[4] Read McMaster's History of the People of the U. S., Vol. V, pp. 28-54.

[5] Jackson had 99 votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. The Constitution (Article XII of the amendments) provides that if no person have a majority of the electoral votes, "then from the persons having the highest numbers, not exceeding three, on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President."

[6] By a vote of 13 states, against 7 for Jackson, and 4 for Crawford.

[7] John Quincy Adams was born at Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1767, went with his father John Adams to France, and spent several years abroad; then graduated from Harvard, studied law, and was appointed by Washington minister to the Netherlands and then to Portugal, and in 1797 to Prussia. He was a senator from Massachusetts in 1803-8. In 1809 Madison sent him as minister to Russia, where he was when the war opened in 1812. Of the five commissioners at Ghent he was the ablest and the most conspicuous. In 1815 Madison appointed him minister to Great Britain, and in 1817 he came home to be Secretary of State under Monroe. In 1831 he became a member of the House of Representatives and continued as such till stricken in the House with paralysis in February, 1848.

[8] John Caldwell Calhoun was born in South Carolina in 1782, entered Yale College in 1802, studied law, and became a lawyer at Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1807. In 1808 he went to the legislature, and in 1811 entered Congress, and was appointed chairman of the committee on foreign relations. As such he wrote the report and resolutions in favor of war with Great Britain. At this period of his career he favored a liberal construction of the Constitution, and supported the tariff of 1816, the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, and internal improvements. He was Secretary of War in Monroe's Cabinet, and was Vice President from 1825 until 1832, when he resigned and entered the Senate, where he remained most of the time till his death in 1850.

[9] This election is noteworthy also as the first in which nearly all the states chose electors by popular vote. Only two of the twenty-four states made the choice by vote of the legislature; in the others the popular vote for Jackson electors numbered 647,276 and that for Adams electors 508,064. A good book on presidential elections is A History of the Presidency, by Edward Stanwood.