Four years before, the stage had been set for a bitter battle. The election of Adams, through the support of Clay, followed by the appointment of the latter to the first place in the Cabinet, had carried the suspicion of a bargain, and this suspicion had crystallized into a firm conviction with a large portion of the people. Throughout the Adams Administration, its enemies—and they were legion—harped constantly upon the “bargain,” angering the crabbed Adams, and stinging Clay to furious denunciation, and this but served to intensify the bitterness of their foes.
The result was the most scurrilous campaign of vilification the country had known. A new school of politicians, forerunners of the astute and none too scrupulous managers of later days, sprang up to direct the fight for the grim old warrior of the Hermitage, and the fact that Clay took personal charge of the campaign for Adams was turned with telling force against his chief. Early in the campaign we find the satirical and caustic Isaac Hill, of the “New Hampshire Patriot,” of whom we shall hear much, writing that “Clay is managing Adams’s campaign, not like a statesman of the Cabinet, but like a shyster, pettifogging in a bastard suit before a country squire.” And lest the motive for Clay’s interest escape his readers, we find Hill writing again: “This is Mr. Clay’s fight. The country has him on trial for bribery, and having no defense, he accuses the prosecutor.”
This reference to the accusation of the prosecutor was inspired by the outrageous calumny that was heaped upon the head of Jackson. He was pictured as a usurper, an adulterer, a gambler, a cockfighter, a brawler, a drunkard, and a murderer. The good name of Mrs. Jackson, one of the purest of women, was wantonly maligned; and in the drawing-rooms of the intellectually elect she was not spared by the ladies who were shocked at the “vulgarity” of her husband. The Adams organs stooped to the attack, and while the “National Intelligencer,” under the editorship of Joseph Gales, refused thus to pollute its columns, the “National Journal,” under the editorial management of Peter Force, and specially favored by the Adams Administration, specialized on the slander of an excellent woman. A little later an attempt was made to justify the infamy of this proceeding by charging that Mrs. Adams had been assailed, but the extent of the assault was the charge that she was an English woman with little sympathy for American institutions.
While history has accepted Adams’s indignant denial of the charge that he had personally sanctioned the attack on Mrs. Jackson, the National Central Committee, in charge of his campaign, was busily engaged in the dissemination of the putrid literature. This has been thoroughly established by the testimony of Thurlow Weed, editor of the “Albany Journal,” who refused to degrade himself by its circulation. When, early in August, before the election in November, he received “two large drygoods boxes” of the pamphlets, with a letter from the National Committee advising him that they contained “valuable campaign documents,” with the request that he attend to their circulation “throughout the western counties of the State,” he promptly “secured the boxes with additional nails and placed them under lock and key.” And when the National Committee learned that they were not being distributed, and sent a representative to protest against his inactivity, he frankly informed the emissary that “not a copy had been seen or would be seen by an elector until the polls had closed.” For this he was denounced in New York and Boston as “a traitor to the Administration,” but the sagacious politician of Albany stoutly maintained that he “would not permit a lady whose life had been blameless to be dragged forth into the arena of politics.”[114]
The charge of murder lodged against Jackson, by editor, hack-writer, and cartoonist, had reference to his execution of Arbuthnot, two Indian chiefs, and seven of his soldiers, and to his duel with Dickinson. Pictures of the coffins of the soldiers were printed on circulars and distributed from farmhouse to farmhouse in New England.[115] This gave Hill an opportunity to tickle Jackson with a rejoinder which was copied from the “New Hampshire Patriot” into all the Jackson papers of the country: “Pshaw! Why don’t you tell the whole truth? On the 8th of January, 1815, he murdered in the coldest kind of cold blood 1500 British soldiers for merely trying to get into New Orleans in search of Booty and Beauty.”
But all the scurrility of the campaign cannot be justly charged to the enemies of Jackson. His friends were almost as offensive. Adams had bribed Clay. He had bought the Presidency. While abroad he had pandered to the sensuality of the Russian Court. He was stingy, undemocratic, an enemy of American institutions, bent on the destruction of the people’s liberties. He was an aristocrat, and had squandered the people’s money in lavishly furnishing the East Room of the White House after the fashion of the homes of kings. He had even purchased a billiard table for the home of the President!
And so it went on for weeks and months—the ordinary slanders of a present-day municipal campaign. A foreigner traveling through the country during the summer and autumn of 1828 would have thought the election of Adams certain. In the marts, the counting-rooms, and the drawing-rooms, he would have found but one opinion; but the astute Adams sensed the coming disaster and recorded his misgivings in his diary. The temperamental Clay was depressed one day, to be exultant the next. But the new school of political leadership, managing the fight for Jackson, and devoting itself assiduously to the newly enfranchised “mob” in the highways and the byways, had no notion of defeat. The “hurrah for Jackson” which shocked the sedate, unaccustomed to such noisy acclaim of a presidential aspirant, and disgusted the “best people,” was music to the ears of these modern politicians, who had carefully calculated upon the strength of the “mob.” Their confidence was not misplaced. The result was an upheaval. Adams, Clay, Federalism, the Virginia Dynasty, the Secretarial Succession, were brushed aside by the rush of the cheering masses bearing their hero to the White House. History has decided that in this campaign “the people first assumed control of the governmental machinery which had been held in trust for them since 1789”; and that “the party and Administration which then came into power was the first in our history which represented the people without restriction, and with all the faults of the people.”[116]
II
The Administration circle in Washington was deeply depressed by the result, and society looked forward to the reign of the barbarians with mingled feelings of mirth and abhorrence. Although not unprepared for the defeat, the bitter Adams, meditating on his political blunders, recorded that “some think I have suffered for not turning my enemies out of office, particularly the Postmaster-General.”[117] That John McLean, the official referred to, had been disloyal to his chief was common knowledge. The first reaction to defeat from the followers of the Adams Administration was toward laughter, levity, extravagant manifestation of cynical gayety, with an all too noticeable thawing of the frigidity of White House ceremonies. The dying régime put on its best bib and tucker in a hectic and hysterical demonstration of social hilarity. But this first reaction was short-lived. Very soon thereafter callers at Clay’s home were “shocked at the alteration of his looks,” and found him “much thinner, very pale, his eyes sunk in his head and his countenance sad and melancholy.”[118] Mr. Rush (Secretary of the Treasury) was soon “alarmingly ill”—the “first symptoms of disease was altogether in the head.” Mr. Southard (Secretary of the Navy) was confined to his room for three weeks. William Wirt (Attorney-General) suffered two attacks of vertigo, “followed by a loss of the sense of motion.” General Porter (Secretary of War) “was almost blind from inflammation of the eyes and went to his office with two blisters, one behind each ear.” Even the cold-blooded Adams, who appeared “in fine spirits,” was soon “so feeble as to be obliged to relinquish his long walks and to substitute rides on horseback.”[119] A social intimate of the leaders swept from power by the rising of the masses mournfully recorded that they would retire to private life “with blasted hopes, injured health, impaired or ruined fortunes, imbittered tempers, and probably a total inability to enjoy the remnant of their lives.”[120]
On none did the blow fall with such crushing force as on the proud-spirited Clay. As the repudiated régime was approaching the end, the presiding genius of one of the favorite Administration drawing-rooms met him at a reception.