“This momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.  I considered it at once as the knell [funeral bell] of the Union.  It is hushed, indeed, for the moment.  But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

—quoted in The Annals of America

The Missouri Compromise

The Monroe administration’s Era of Good Feelings could not ward off the nation’s growing sectional disputes and the passionately differing opinions over slavery.  Tensions rose to the boiling point in 1819, when Missouri’s application for statehood stirred up the country’s most divisive issue:  whether slavery should expand westward.

In 1819 the Union consisted of 11 free and 11 slave states.  While the House of Representatives already had a majority of Northerners, admitting any new state, either slave or free, would upset the balance in the Senate and touch off a bitter struggle over political power.

Missouri’s territorial government requested admission into the Union as a slave state in 1819.  Acting for slavery’s opponents, Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr., of New York proposed a resolution that prohibited slaveholders from bringing new slaves into Missouri.  The resolution also called for all enslaved children currently living in Missouri to be freed at age 25.  The House accepted the proposal, but the Senate rejected it.  Most Senators and members of the House of Representatives from the South voted against the ban, while most from the North voted in favor of it.

Finally, a solution emerged when Maine, which for decades had been part of Massachusetts, requested admission to the Union as a separate state.  The Senate decided to combine Maine’s request with Missouri’s, and it voted to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.  This solution preserved the balance in the Senate.  Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois then proposed an amendment that would prohibit slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north of Missouri’s southern border.  This would allow slavery to expand into Arkansas territory south of Missouri, but it would keep it out of the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.

Since many people at the time thought the Great Plains area north of Missouri was not suitable for farming, it appeared that this Missouri Compromise benefited the South.  By a very close vote, carefully managed by Henry Clay of Kentucky, the House of Representatives voted to accept the Compromise.  The Compromise held out the hope that pairing the admission of free and slave states together would quiet the dispute over the expansion of slavery.

Once the issue was settled, however, a new problem developed.  Pro-slavery members of the Missouri constitutional convention added a clause to the proposed state constitution prohibiting free African Americans from entering the state.  This new controversy threatened final approval of Missouri’s admission to the Union.  Clay again engineered a solution by getting the Missouri legislature to state that they would not honor the spirit of the clause’s wording.

Despite Clay’s efforts, many leaders feared that the Missouri Compromise was only a temporary solution.  “I take it for granted,” John Quincy Adams wrote, “that the present question is a mere preamble—a title page to a great tragic volume.”

Examining
Why was the Missouri Compromise proposed?
 

The Election of 1824

Politics reflected the sectional tensions of the day.  Although the Republicans had supporters throughout the nation, sectional differences over beliefs and policies were growing obvious.  The presidential campaign of 1824 showed how splintered the party was becoming.

GOVERNMENT
A Battle of Favorite Sons

Four candidates ran for president in 1824.  All belonged to the Republican Party and all were “favorite sons,” men who enjoyed the support of leaders from their own state and region.  Two candidates, Henry Clay of Kentucky and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, represented the West.  John Quincy Adams, a Massachusetts man then serving as President Monroe’s secretary of state, was New England’s favorite son.  William Crawford of Georgia represented the South.

Crawford ran on the original principles of Jefferson’s party—states’ rights and strict interpretation of the Constitution.  Clay favored the national bank, the protective tariff, and nationwide internal improvements—collectively known as the American System.  Adams was also in favor of internal improvements, but he was less enthusiastic about tariffs.  Jackson steered clear of specific issues.  His campaign focused on his personal heroism at the Battle of New Orleans.

On Election Day Jackson won the most popular votes, but no candidate won a majority in the Electoral College.  Following constitutional procedure, the election went to the House of Representatives, whose members would select the president from the three candidates who received the highest number of electoral votes.  Clay, who had placed fourth, was eliminated.

As the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay enjoyed tremendous influence there, and few doubted which candidate he would support.  Clay and Jackson had been rivals for political leadership of the West and disliked each other intensely.  Clay once described Jackson as “ignorant, passionate, hypocritical, [and] corrupt.” Jackson referred to Clay as the “meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his god.”

On a snowy February 9, 1825, the representatives met to make their choice.  As expected, Clay threw his political weight behind Adams and helped him win the House election easily.  Adams received 13 votes, while Jackson won 7 and Crawford won 4.

The Corrupt Bargain

The hard feelings of the election campaign only intensified with Adams’s victory.  Andrew Jackson Donelson, Jackson’s nephew, joined others in accusing Clay of arranging votes for Adams in return for a cabinet post:

“It is rumored and believed by every body here that Mr.  Clay will be made Secretary of State. ...  What a farce!  That Mr. Adams should swear to support the constitution of the [United] States which he has purchased from Representatives who betrayed the constitution, and which he must distribute among them as rewards for the iniquity.”

—quoted in Henry Clay

Upon taking office, the new president did indeed name Clay as his secretary of state, and Jackson’s supporters cried foul.  They accused Adams and Clay of striking a “corrupt bargain.”

Adams and Clay denied any wrongdoing, and no evidence of a deal ever emerged.  Still, Jackson’s outraged supporters came together in opposition to the Adams presidency.  They took the name Democratic-Republicans to stress their differences with the party of John Quincy Adams—now called the National Republicans.  Eventually the pro-Jackson party shortened the name to Democrats.

Summarizing
How did John Quincy Adams win the election of 1824?
 

The Presidency of John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams, son of the second president, had earned a reputation as the greatest secretary of state in the nation’s brief history.  A highly intelligent and hardworking man, he intended to leave his mark on the presidency.

In his first message to Congress, Adams announced an ambitious program of nationalist legislation that exceeded even Clay’s American System.  Alongside standard internal improvements, Adams urged that federal revenue also be used to build a national university and astronomical observatories, and to fund scientific research.  To bar the federal government from these activities, he wrote, ”would be to hide in the earth the talent committed to our change.”

Adams’s proposals, however, struck many legislators as a renewal of his father’s Federalist principles.  His opponents received the president’s initiatives with scorn.  It would be extravagant, they believed, to spend the taxpayers’ money on such projects.

In the end, Congress granted the president funds for improving rivers and harbors and for extending the National Road westward, but this was far less than he had wanted.  The repeated rebuffs he suffered in Congress set the stage for Adams’s defeat in his 1828 reelection attempt.

Identifying
What did John Quincy Adams hope to accomplish during his presidency?
 

The Election of 1828

The presidential election of 1828 pitted John Quincy Adams against Andrew Jackson.  The two men waged a bitter campaign, as Jackson fought to achieve a victory that his supporters believed had been unjustly denied him four years earlier.

The campaign descended into mudslinging, in which candidates criticized each other’s personalities and morals.  Adams called his opponent “incompetent both by his ignorance and by the fury of his passions.” Jackson portrayed himself as the candidate of the common man and attacked Adams as an out-of-touch aristocrat.  Jackson’s supporters also called Adams a gambler for purchasing a billiard table and chess set for the White House.  Jackson also revived the alleged “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay as evidence that the president was untrustworthy.

When the results came in, Jackson had 56 percent of the popular vote and 178 of the 261 electoral votes, a clear victory.  Many of the voters who supported Jackson were from the West and South, rural and small-town men who saw Jackson as the candidate most likely to represent their interests.  The man whose fiery personality had earned him the nickname “Old Hickory,” after a tough, hard wood found on the frontier, finally had reached the White House.

Summarizing
How did Adams and Jackson portray each other during the 1828 campaign?
 

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