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UNITED STATES
[HISTORY 1801–1829

the few remaining Federalists as identical with their own. The nationalizing faction of the dominant party had scored almost Election of 1824. all the successes of the administration, and the divergence between it and the opposing faction was steadily becoming more apparent. All the candidates for the presidency in 1824—Andrew Jackson, a private citizen of Tennessee; William H. Crawford, Monroe's secretary of the treasury; John Quincy Adams, his secretary of state; and Henry Clay, the speaker of the House of Representatives—claimed to be Republicans alike; but the personal nature of the struggle was shown by the tendency of their supporters to call themselves “Adams men” or “Jackson men,” rather than by any real party title. Calhoun was supported by all groups for the vice presidency, and was elected without difficulty. The choice of a president was more doubtful.

160. None of the four candidates had anything like a party organization behind him. Adams and Clay represented the nationalizing element, as Crawford and Jackson did not; but there the likeness among them stopped. The strongest forces behind Adams were the new Party Divergence. manufacturing and commercial interests of the East; behind Clay were the desires of the West for internal improvements at Federal expense as a set-off to the benefits which the seaboard states had already received from the government; and the two elements were soon to be united into the National Republican or Whig party (q.v.). Crawford was the representative of the old Democratic party, with all its Southern influences and leanings. Jackson was the personification of the new democracy—not very cultured, perhaps, but honest, and hating every shade of class control instinctively. As he became better known the whole force of the new drift of things turned in his direction. Crawford was taken out of the race, just after the electors had cast their votes, by physical failure, and Adams, later, by the revival of ancient quarrels with the Federalists of New England; and the future was to be with Clay or with Jackson. But in 1824 the electors gave no one a majority; and the House of Representatives, voting by states, gave the presidency to Adams.

161. Adams's election in 1825 was due to the fact that Clay's friends in the House—unable to vote for him, as he was the lowest in the electoral vote, and only three names were open to choice in the House—very naturally gave their votes to Adams. As Adams appointed Clay The Adams Administration
1825-29.
to the leading position in his cabinet, the defeated party at once raised the cry of “bargain and intrigue,” one of the most effective in a democracy, and it was kept up throughout Adams's four years of office. Jackson had received the largest number of electoral votes, though not a majority,[1] and the hazy notion that he had been injured because of his devotion to the people increased his popularity. Though demagogues made use of it for selfish purposes, this feeling was an honest one, and Adams had nothing to oppose to it. He tried vigorously to uphold the “American system,” and succeeded in passing the tariff of 1828; he tried to maintain the influence of the United States on both the American continents; but he remained as unpopular as his rival grew popular. In 1828 Adams was easily displaced by Jackson, the electoral vote being 178 to 83. Calhoun was re-elected vice-president.

162. Jackson's inauguration in 1829 closes this period, as it ends the time during which a disruption of the Union by the of peaceable withdrawal of any state was even possible. The party which had made state sovereignty its bulwark in 1798 was now in control of the government Election of 1828. Democracy and Nationality. again; but Jackson's proclamation in his first term, in which he warned South Carolina that “disunion by armed force is treason,” and that blood must flow if the laws were resisted, speaks a very different tone from the speculations of Jefferson on possible future divisions of the United States. And even the sudden attempt of South Carolina to exercise independent action (§§ 172-173) shows that some interest dependent upon state sovereignty had taken alarm at the drift of events, and was anxious to lodge a claim to the right before it should slip from its fingers for ever. Nullification was only the first skirmish between the two hostile forces of slavery and democracy.

163. When the vast territory of Louisiana was acquired in 1803 the new owner found slavery already established there by custom recognized by French and Spanish law. Congress tacitly ratified existing law by taking no action; slavery continued legal, and spread further through the Slavery. territory; and the state of Louisiana entered as a slave state in 1812. The next state to be carved out of the territory was Missouri, admitted in 1821. A Territory, on applying for admission as a state, brings a constitution for inspection by Congress; and when it was found that the new state of Missouri proposed to recognize and continue slavery, a vigorous opposition spread through the North and West, and carried most of the senators and representatives from those sections with it. In the House of Representatives these two sections had a greatly superior number of members; but, as the number of Northern and Southern states had been kept about equal, the compact Southern vote, with one or two Northern allies, generally retained control of the Senate. Admitted by the Senate and rejected by the House, Missouri's application hung suspended for two years until it was successful by the admission of Maine, a balancing Northern state,[2] and by The Missouri Compromise. the following arrangement, known as the Missouri Compromise of 1820: Missouri was to enter as a slave state; slavery was for ever prohibited throughout the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of lat. 36° 30′, the main southern boundary of Missouri; and, though nothing was said of the territory south of the compromise line, it was understood that any state formed out of it was to be a slave state, if it so wished (see Missouri Compromise and Missouri, § History). Arkansas entered under this provision in 1836.

164. The question of slavery was thus set at rest for the present, though a few agitators were roused to more zealous opposition to the essence of slavery itself. In the next decade these agitators succeeded only in the conversion of a few recruits, but these recruits were the ones who Sectional Divergence. took up the work at the opening of the next period and never gave it up until slavery was ended. It is plain now, however, that North and South had already drifted so far apart as to form two sections, and it became evident during the next forty years that the wants and desires of these two sections were so divergent that it was impossible for one government to make satisfactory laws for both. The chief cause was not removed in 1820, though one of its effects was got out of the way for the time.

165. The vast flood of human beings which had been pouring westward for years had now pretty well occupied the territory east of the Mississippi, while, on the west side of that stream, it still showed a disposition to hold to the river valleys. The settled area had increased from The Settled Area. 240,000 sq. m. in 1790 to 633,000 sq. m. in 1830, with an average of 20.3 persons to the square mile. There was still a great deal of Indian territory in the Southern states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, for the Southern Indians were among the finest of their race; they had become semi-civilized, and were formidable antagonists to the encroaching white race. The states interested had begun preparations for their forcible removal, in public defiance (see Georgia: History) of the attempts of the Federal government to protect the Indians (1827); but the removal was not completed until 1835. In the North, Wisconsin and Michigan, with the northern halves of Illinois and Indiana, were still very thinly settled, but everything indicated early increase of population. The first lake steamboat, the “Walk-in-the-Water,” had appeared at Detroit in 1818, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 added to the number

  1. Jackson received 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37; in the House of Representatives Adams received the votes of 13 states, Jackson of 7, and Crawford of 4. For vice-president Calhoun received 182 electoral votes, and his principal competitors, Nathan Sanford, of New York, and Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, received 30 and 24 respectively.
  2. A prompt admission of Missouri would have balanced the slave and free states, but Alabama's admission as a slave state balanced them in 1819.