John Randolph, who also described Adams and Clay as “the Puritan and the blackleg.” This led to a duel, in which neither aggrieved party (Clay and Randolph) was injured. Calhoun was easily elected vice president.
After this election, the Adams and Clay groups became National Republicans, while the Jacksonians became the successors to Jefferson and Madison as Democratic-Republicans. Adams declined to politicize the civil service and dismissed only 12 federal government employees in his term, and those for objective cause. It was an admirable stance, but nothing was going to stop the charge of Jackson, swearing vengeance for the corrupt bargain and claiming to be the spear of the people as they seized control of government from the elites. In his address to the Congress in December 1825, Adams proposed an extensive program of roads and canals, a national university and observatory, and further exploration of the interior. It was an ambitious program, but one bound to offend the states’ rights advocates, which included all the South and much of the Southwest, essentially because of fear of attacks on slavery. This was the key to discussion of federal aid to public works, and was indicative of self-defeating government minimalism. It was held that if the federal government had the power to build public works all over the country, there would then be nothing to stop it from tampering with slavery. The South was already retreating into a slave mentality. Calhoun, as president of the Senate, elevated many opponents of the administration, as he was now the South’s leading political figure and used his position to advance his own status and not to support the administration (having probably received more votes for his office from followers of Jackson than of Adams).
The whole first half of 1826 was taken up with debate over U.S. attendance at the Panama Conference. This was a pan–Latin American meeting organized by the liberator of much of South America, Simón Bolívar, who was seeking a tight alliance between all the states against Spain or any outside interloper. He sought a continental assembly and the right to require military support and solidarity from all constituent states. Colombia and Mexico insisted that the United States be invited, and Adams agreed to be represented. This created awkwardnesses; where Adams and Clay believed that American preeminence in the hemisphere required American representation, Calhoun and Senator Martin Van Buren, a devious New York wheelhorse who would hold almost every elective office and champion different sides of many issues, opposed U.S. attendance, ostensibly because the Senate had not been consulted before Adams accepted the invitation, and because attendance would violate American opposition to intrusion in the affairs of other countries. The real reason for the concern of the South was that there would be black national leaders present and they did not wish to exalt the dignity of “negroes” ethnically indistinguishable from slaves.
The Congress supported the administration, after vigorous debate, but the representatives Adams sent did not arrive, one because of death en route. That there should have been a heated six-month debate on such a trivial issue illustrated the extreme sensitivity of the slavery issue. Southern leaders overreacted, reacted preemptively, and generally betrayed a nearly paranoid fear of criticism of slavery. Calhoun was the leader of this strain of opinion, and Van Buren went along with it only to cement his relations with Jackson, whom he saw more clearly than some as the coming man.
Thomas Jefferson, aged 83, and John Adams, aged 91, died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s last words were alleged to have been that “Jefferson survives.” They had mended their quarrels of decades before and enjoyed an extensive and often eloquent correspondence. Adams had the pleasure, as the only president to this point to have been denied reelection, of seeing his son installed as president, at time of writing a feat replicated only by the Bushes. The senior Adams and Jefferson had seen a tremendous advance of the country they had done so much to establish, including a steady advance of popular government, a discarding of property and tax-paying qualifications for voting, and the movement in all states except Delaware and South Carolina of the selection of presidential electors from the state legislators directly to the voters.
The North-South divisions were aggravated by the tariff debates of the late twenties. Northern and central manufacturing states wanted higher tariffs for textiles and steel and iron goods, to protect their ever-growing domestic market, while the South wanted those goods to be cheaper, and did not want to provoke tariff retaliation by the wide range of foreign countries to which the South exported agricultural products and cotton. The South was fiercely attached to the principle of absolute equality with the North, which it was losing demographically, though it was maintained in the Senate. As the North grew more quickly, and tariffs prospered its own industries while handicapping those of the South, and the North aspersed slavery and the ownership by people of other human beings, southerners came to question in increasing numbers the value and utility of the Union to them.
As early as 1813, an in camera Federalist convention had met and proposed a series of constitutional amendments that included elimination of the three-fifths rule regarding the counting of slaves in calculating congressional representation and the composition of the Electoral College; the admission of new states and declaration of embargoes or of war only with two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress; and the prohibition of a second presidential term and of successive presidents from the same state. The report of this convention arrived in Washington as the Treaty of Ghent arrived, and the issues died, especially after the vibrant 1824 presidential contest between a Deep South candidate, a New Englander, and two frontiersmen. But it indicated the stresses the Virginia Dynasty and the War of 1812 had caused. The grievances and sensibilities of the South would not be so easily appeased. Three of the four 1824 presidential candidates were slaveholders, three-quarters of the people were not, 15 percent of the people were black, and 15 percent of those were free. It was bound to become very complicated, very quickly.
Severe strains between the regions arose again over tariffs. The Jacksonians in control of the Congress determined to embarrass the president by proposing outrageously high tariffs (“The Tariff of Abominations”) on a wide range of products, to ensure that all sections voted against it, and Jackson’s supporters would take credit for its defeat in the South and West, which saw tariffs as a sop to the eastern and northern states, which would blame Adams for the defeat. This was the cynical design of the unholy alliance between Calhoun and Van Buren, and it backfired, because New England voted for the tariffs as supportive of the principle of protection, and the measure passed. Calhoun then baptized himself in political chicanery by total immersion, by leading South Carolina (six weeks after his reelection as vice president in 1828) to adopt a series of legislative resolutions protesting the constitutionality of the tariff Calhoun had himself co-sponsored on the assumption that it would be defeated. He also wrote, though he did not sign, a treatise that embraced the separatist concept of nullification—the ability of a state simply to declare that a federal law did not apply within that state. This was not compatible with any serious notion of the United States (though Jefferson had flirted with it after the Alien and Sedition Acts under the senior Adams). This constitutional heresy would prove almost inextinguishable, and was still being bandied about by southern segregationists in the 1960s. It was a public rumination on separatism: the acceptance of the benefits of the Union while eschewing anything thought to be burdensome. It was an outrage from the just-reelected vice president of the United States of America, Monroe’s war secretary, and the co-author of a tariff whose adoption he now purported to find unconstitutional. The rot at the core of the American Union was already a life-threatening tumor.
11. THE RISE OF JACKSON
Jackson had retired as a senator in 1825, following the Tennessee legislature’s nomination of him for president (presidential aspirants threw their hats into the ring much earlier in these times), and he accepted Calhoun as his running mate. Now, and henceforth, this party was called the Democrats, leaving “Republican” for adoption by a new force 30 years hence. President Adams was renominated by what was called the National Republican convention, meeting in Harrisburg. He took as his running mate, Richard Rush, former minister to Great Britain and attorney general and current secretary of war.
Jackson was now, in 1828, an unstoppable political force: as the demographic center of the country moved across the Appalachians,
