The supremacy of the Democratic-Republican party lasted practically unchallenged until John Quincy Adams was elected, under peculiar circumstances, in 1824. There were in that year three leading candidates for the Presidency—Adams, Clay, and Jackson. As neither of them commanded a majority of the Electoral College, the question was referred to the House of Representatives, which selected Adams as being, in a measure, a compromise candidate.
John Quincy Adams was at that time acting with the Democratic party, but he was, as James Parton points out in his “Life of Jackson,” “a Federalist by birth, by disposition, by early association, by confirmed habit.” And it soon became clear that Federalism, long supposed to be dead, was “living, rampant, and sitting in the seat of power.” Federalists were appointed to office—notably Rufus King, the most conspicuous survivor of the original Federalists—who was sent as minister to England. Adams was for stretching the Constitution, as the old Federalists were. In his first message to Congress he advocated government roads and canals, a government university and observatory, government exploring expeditions, and the like.
His personality and manners revived the aristocratic traditions of his father. In the state he maintained at Washington he was said to go beyond the first President Adams. He refurnished the White House on a grand scale, and shocked the frugal taste of the day by placing a billiard table in it. The East Room, in which his excellent mother had hung clothes to dry, was now a luxuriously fitted apartment.
“John II.” was the name that John Randolph of Roanoke bestowed upon the son and heir of the “Duke of Braintree.” Randolph had hated the Adams family since an incident that occurred on the day of Washington’s inauguration, which he recalled long afterwards in one of his speeches. “I remember,” he said, “the manner in which my brother was spurned by the coachman of the Vice-President—John Adams—for coming too near the vice-regal carriage.”
Even Mr. Blaine, who in his “Twenty Years of Congress” shows himself a kindly critic of the Federalist ideas and Federalist leaders, admits the “general unpopularity attached to the name of Adams.”
During John Quincy Adams’ administration the mutterings of a coming political upheaval began to be heard. It began to be said that the Presidency was growing too much like an hereditary monarchy. It was becoming too settled a practice for each incumbent, after eight years in office, to make his Secretary of State his political heir. It gave the President what was almost equivalent to the power of appointing his successor. John Quincy Adams, it was said, counted confidently on the usual double term, and upon seeing his friend Clay, to whom he had given the chief post in his Cabinet, elected to succeed him.
“The issue is fairly made out: Shall the government or the people rule?” asked Andrew Jackson, and on that issue he appealed to the country in his memorable electoral campaign against Adams, in 1828. That was the bitterest Presidential contest that had ever been fought. Jackson was attacked with unexampled ferocity. One day at his Tennessee home, the Hermitage, his wife found him in tears. “Myself I can defend,” he said, pointing to a newspaper which he had been reading; “you I can defend; but now they have assailed even the memory of my mother.” And it was, in great part, her distress at the invective that was heaped upon her husband that caused the death of Mrs. Jackson just after the election.
It was a pitched battle between the “classes” and the “masses.” As James Parton says, in his biography of Jackson: “Nearly all the talent, nearly all the learning, nearly all the ancient wealth, nearly all the business activity, nearly all the book-nourished intelligence, nearly all the silver-forked civilization of the country, united in opposition to General Jackson, who represented the country’s untutored instincts.”