PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

OF

AMERICA

1824-1880

emerge of lincoln

ELECTION OF 1824

John Quincy Adams vs. Henry Clay vs. Andrew Jackson vs. William Crawford
The Republican party broke apart in the 1824 election. A large majority of the states now chose electors by popular vote, and the people’s vote was considered sufficiently important to record. The nomination of candidates by congressional caucus was discredited. Groups in each state nominated candidates for the presidency, resulting in a multiplicity of favorite-son candidacies.

By the fall of 1824 four candidates remained in the running. William Crawford of Georgia, the secretary of the treasury, had been the early front-runner, but severe illness hampered his candidacy. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts had a brilliant record of government service, but his Federalist background, his cosmopolitanism, and his cold New England manner cost him support outside his own region. Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who owed his popularity to his 1815 victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, were the other candidates.

With four candidates, none received a majority. Jackson received 99 electoral votes with 152,901 popular votes (42.34 percent); Adams, 84 electoral votes with 114,023 popular votes (31.57 percent); Crawford, 41 electoral votes and 47,217 popular votes (13.08 percent); and Clay, 37 electoral votes and 46,979 popular votes (13.01 percent). The choice of president therefore fell to the House of Representatives. Many politicians assumed that House Speaker Henry Clay had the power to choose the next president but not to elect himself. Clay threw his support to Adams, who was then elected. When Adams subsequently named Clay secretary of state, the Jacksonians charged that the two men had made a “corrupt bargain.”

John C. Calhoun was chosen vice president by the electoral college with a majority of 182 votes.

ELECTION OF 1828

Andrew Jackson vs. John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson won the presidency in 1828 by a landslide, receiving a record 647,292 popular votes (56 percent) to 507,730 (44 percent) for the incumbent John Quincy Adams. John C. Calhoun won the vice presidency with 171 electoral votes to 83 for Richard Rush and 7 for William Smith.

The emergence of two parties promoted popular interest in the election. Jackson’s party, sometimes called the Democratic-Republicans or simply Democrats, developed the first sophisticated national network of party organizations. Local party groups sponsored parades, barbecues, tree plantings, and other popular events designed to promote Jackson and the local slate. The National-Republicans, the party of Adams and Henry Clay, lacked the local organizations of the Democrats, but they did have a clear platform: high tariffs, federal funding of roads, canals, and other internal improvements, aid to domestic manufactures, and development of cultural institutions.

The 1828 election campaign was one of the dirtiest in America’s history. Both parties spread false and exaggerated rumors about the opposition. Jackson men charged that Adams obtained the presidency in 1824 through a “corrupt bargain” with Clay. And they painted the incumbent president as a decadent aristocrat, who had procured prostitutes for the czar while serving as U.S. minister to Russia and spent taxpayer money on “gambling” equipment for the White House (actually a chess set and a billiard table).

The National-Republicans portrayed Jackson as a violent frontier ruffian, the son, some said, of a prostitute married to a mulatto. When Jackson and his wife, Rachel, married, the couple believed that her first husband had obtained a divorce. After learning the divorce had not yet been made final, the couple held a second, valid wedding. Now the Adams men claimed Jackson was a bigamist and an adulterer. More justifiably, administration partisans questioned Jackson’s sometimes violent discipline of the army in the War of 1812 and the brutality of his invasion of Florida in the Seminole War. Ironically, Secretary of State Adams had defended Jackson at the time of the Seminole War, taking advantage of Jackson’s unauthorized incursion to obtain Florida for the United States from Spain.

ELECTION OF 1832

Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay vs. William Wirt
Democratic-Republican Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832 with 688,242 popular votes (54.5 percent) to 473,462 (37.5 percent) for National-Republican Henry Clay and 101,051 (8 percent) for Anti-Masonic candidate William Wirt. Jackson easily carried the electoral college with 219 votes. Clay received only 49, and Wirt won the 7 votes of Vermont. Martin Van Buren won the vice presidency with 189 votes against 97 for various other candidates.

The spoils system of political patronage, the tariff, and federal funding of internal improvements were major issues, but the most important was Jackson’s veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. National-Republicans attacked the veto, arguing that the Bank was needed to maintain a stable currency and economy. “King Andrew’s” veto, they asserted, was an abuse of executive power. In defense of Jackson’s veto, Democratic-Republicans labeled the Bank an aristocratic institution–a “monster.” Suspicious of banking and of paper money, Jacksonians opposed the Bank for giving special privileges to private investors at government expense and charged that it fostered British control of the American economy.

For the first time in American politics, a third party, the Anti-Masons, challenged the two major parties. Many politicians of note participated, including Thaddeus Stevens, William H. Seward, and Thurlow Weed. The Anti-Masonic party formed in reaction to the murder of William Morgan, a former upstate New York Freemason. Allegedly, some Masons murdered Morgan when he threatened to publish some of the order’s secrets. The Anti-Masons protested Masonic secrecy. They feared a conspiracy to control American political institutions, a fear fed by the fact that both the major party candidates, Jackson and Clay, were prominent Masons.

The Anti-Masons convened the first national presidential nominating convention in Baltimore on September 26, 1831. The other parties soon followed suit, and the convention replaced the discredited caucus system of nomination.

ELECTION OF 1836

Martin Van Buren vs. Daniel Webster vs. Hugh White
The election of 1836 was largely a referendum on Andrew Jackson, but it also helped shape what is known as the second party system. The Democrats nominated Vice President Martin Van Buren to lead the ticket. His running mate, Col. Richard M. Johnson, claimed to have killed Indian chief Tecumseh. (Johnson was controversial because he lived openly with a black woman.)

Disdaining the organized politics of the Democrats, the new Whig party ran three candidates, each strong in a different region: Hugh White of Tennessee, SenatorDaniel Webster of Massachusetts, and Gen. William Henry Harrison of Indiana. Besides endorsing internal improvements and a national bank, the Whigs tried to tie Democrats to abolitionism and sectional tension, and attacked Jackson for “acts of aggression and usurpation of power.” Democrats depended on Jackson’s popularity, trying to maintain his coalition.

Van Buren won the election with 764,198 popular votes, only 50.9 percent of the total, and 170 electoral votes. Harrison led the Whigs with 73 electoral votes, White receiving 26 and Webster 14. Willie P. Mangum of South Carolina received his state’s 11 electoral votes. Johnson, who failed to win an electoral majority, was elected vice president by the Democratic Senate.

ELECTION OF 1840

William Henry Harrison vs. Martin Van Buren
Aware that Van Buren’s problems gave them a good chance for victory, the Whigs rejected the candidacy of Henry Clay, their most prominent leader, because of his support for the unpopular Second Bank of the United States. Instead, stealing a page from the Democratic emphasis on Andrew Jackson’s military exploits, they chose William Henry Harrison, a hero of early Indian wars and the War of 1812. The Whig vice-presidential nominee was John Tyler, a onetime Democrat who had broken with Jackson over his veto of the bill rechartering the Second Bank.

Studiously avoiding divisive issues like the Bank and internal improvements, the Whigs depicted Harrison as living in a “log cabin” and drinking “hard cider.” They used slogans like “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” and “Van, Van, Van/Van is a used-up man” to stir voters. Harrison won by a popular vote of 1,275,612 to 1,130,033, and an electoral margin of 234 to 60. But the victory proved to be a hollow one because Harrison died one month after his inauguration. Tyler, his successor, would not accept Whig economic doctrine, and the change in presidential politics had little effect on presidential policy.

ELECTION OF 1844

James K. Polk vs. Henry Clay vs. James Birney
The election of 1844 introduced expansion and slavery as important political issues and contributed to westward and southern growth and sectionalism. Southerners of both parties sought to annex Texas and expand slavery. Martin Van Buren angered southern Democrats by opposing annexation for that reason, and the Democratic convention cast aside the ex-president and front-runner for the first dark horse, Tennessee’s James K. Polk. After almost silently breaking with Van Buren over Texas, Pennsylvania’s George M. Dallas was nominated for vice president to appease Van Burenites, and the party backed annexation and settling the Oregon boundary dispute with England. The abolitionist Liberty party nominated Michigan’s James G. Birney. Trying to avoid controversy, the Whigs nominated anti-annexationist Henry Clay of Kentucky and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. But, pressured by southerners, Clay endorsed annexation, although concerned it might cause war with Mexico and disunion, and thereby lost support among antislavery Whigs.

Enough New Yorkers voted for Birney to throw 36 electoral votes and the election to Polk, who won the electoral college, 170-105, and a slim popular victory. John Tyler signed a joint congressional resolution admitting Texas, but Polk pursued Oregon, and then northern Mexico in the Mexican War, aggravating tension over slavery and sectional balance and leading toward the Compromise of 1850.

ELECTION OF 1848

Zachary Taylor vs. Martin Van Buren vs. Lewis Cass
The election of 1848 underscored the increasingly important role of slavery in national politics. Democratic president James K. Polk did not seek reelection. His party nominated Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, who created the concept of squatter, or popular, sovereignty (letting the settlers of a territory decide whether to permit slavery), with Gen. William O. Butler of Kentucky for vice president. Antislavery groups formed the Free-Soil party, whose platform promised to prohibit the spread of slavery, and chose former president Martin Van Buren of New York for president and Charles Francis Adams, the son of President John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts for vice president. The Whig nominee was the Mexican War hero, Gen. Zachary Taylor, a slave owner. His running mate wasMillard Fillmore, a member of New York’s proslavery Whig faction.

Democrats and Free-Soilers stressed their views of slavery, and Whigs celebrated Taylor’s victories in the recent war, although many Whigs had opposed it. For his part, Taylor professed moderation on slavery, and he and the Whigs were successful. Taylor defeated Cass, 1,360,099 to 1,220,544 in popular votes and 163 to 127 in electoral votes. Van Buren received 291,263 popular votes and no electoral votes, but he drew enough support away from Cass to swing New York and Massachusetts to Taylor, assuring the Whigs’ victory. With the Taylor-Fillmore ticket elected, the forces had been set in motion for the events surrounding the Compromise of 1850. But Van Buren’s campaign was a stepping-stone toward the creation of the Republican party in the 1850s, also committed to the principle of “Free Soil.”

ELECTION OF 1852

Franklin Pierce vs. Winfield Scott vs. John Pitale
The 1852 election rang a death knell for the Whig party. Both parties split over their nominee and the issue of slavery. After forty-nine ballots of jockeying among Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, former secretary of state James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the Democrats nominated a compromise choice, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a former congressman and senator, with Senator William R. King of Alabama as his running mate. The Whigs rejected Millard Fillmore, who had become president when Taylor died in 1850, and Secretary of State Daniel Webster and nominated Gen. Winfield Scott of Virginia, with Senator William A. Graham of New Jersey for vice president. When Scott endorsed the party platform, which approved of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Free-Soil Whigs bolted. They nominated Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire for president and former congressman George Washington Julian of Indiana for vice president. Southern Whigs were suspicious of Scott, whom they saw as a tool of antislavery senator William H. Seward of New York.

Democratic unity, Whig disunity, and Scott’s political ineptitude combined to elect Pierce. “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills” outpolled “Old Fuss and Feathers” in the electoral college, 254 to 42, and in the popular vote, 1,601,474 to 1,386,578.

ELECTION OF 1856

James Buchanan vs. Millard Fillmore vs. John C. Freemont
The 1856 election was waged by new political coalitions and was the first to confront directly the issue of slavery. The violence that followed the Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed the old political system and past formulas of compromises. The Whig party was dead. Know-Nothings nominated Millard Fillmore to head their nativist American party and chose Andrew J. Donelson for vice president. The Democratic party, portraying itself as the national party, nominated James Buchanan for president and John C. Breckinridge for vice president. Its platform supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act and noninterference with slavery. This election saw the emergence of a new, sectional party composed of ex-Whigs, Free-Soil Democrats, and antislavery groups. The Republican party opposed the extension of slavery and promised a free-labor society with expanded opportunities for white workers. It nominated military hero, John C. Frémont of California for president and William L. Dayton for vice president.

The campaign centered around “Bleeding Kansas.” The battle over the concept of popular sovereignty sharpened northern fears about the spread of slavery and southern worries about northern interference. The physical assault by Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the Senate heightened northern resentment of southern aggressiveness.

Although the Democratic candidate, Buchanan, won with 174 electoral votes and 1,838,169 votes, the divided opposition gained more popular votes. The Republican party captured 1,335,264 votes and 114 in the electoral college, and the American party received 874,534 popular and 8 electoral votes. The Republicans’ impressive showing–carrying eleven of sixteen free states and 45 percent of northern ballots–left the South feeling vulnerable to attacks on slavery and fearful the Republicans would soon capture the government.

ELECTION OF 1860

Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas vs. John C. Breckingridge vs. John Bell
At the Republican convention, front-runner William H. Seward of New York faced insurmountable obstacles: conservatives feared his radical statements about an “irrepressible conflict” over slavery and a “higher law” than the Constitution, and radicals doubted his moral scruples. Hoping to carry moderate states like Illinois and Pennsylvania, the party nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois for president and Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for vice president. The Republican platform called for a ban on slavery in the territories, internal improvements, a homestead act, a Pacific railroad, and a tariff.

The Democratic convention, which met at Charleston, could not agree on a candidate, and most of the southern delegates bolted. Reconvening in Baltimore, the convention nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for president and Senator Herschel Johnson of Georgia for vice president. Southern Democrats then met separately and chose Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon as their candidates.Former Whigs and Know-Nothings formed the Constitutional Union party, nominating Senator John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts. Their only platform was “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it is.”

By carrying almost the entire North, Lincoln won in the electoral college with 180 votes to 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and 12 for Douglas. Lincoln won a popular plurality of about 40 percent, leading the popular vote with 1,766,452 to 1,376,957 for Douglas, 849,781 for Breckinridge, and 588,879 for Bell. With the election of a sectional northern candidate, the Deep South seceded from the Union, followed within a few months by several states of the Upper South.

ELECTION OF 1864

Abraham Lincoln vs. George B. McClellan

The contest in the midst of the Civil War pitted President Abraham Lincoln against Democrat George B. McClellan, the general who had commanded the Army of the Potomac until his indecision and delays caused Lincoln to remove him. The vice-presidential candidates were Andrew Johnson, Tennessee’s military governor who had refused to acknowledge his state’s secession, and Representative George Pendleton of Ohio. At first, Radical Republicans, fearing defeat, talked of ousting Lincoln in favor of the more ardently antislavery secretary of the treasury Salmon P. Chase, or Generals John C. Frémont or Benjamin F. Butler. But in the end they fell in behind the president.

The Republicans attracted Democratic support by running as the Union party and putting Johnson, a pro-war Democrat, on the ticket. McClellan repudiated the Democratic platform’s call for peace, but he attacked Lincoln’s handling of the war.

Lincoln won in a landslide, owing partly to a policy of letting soldiers go home to vote. But the military successes of Generals Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia and William T. Sherman in the Deep South were probably more important. He received 2,206,938 votes to McClellan’s 1,803,787. The electoral vote was 212 to 21. Democrats did better in state elections.

ELECTION OF 1868

Ulysses S. Grant vs. Horace Seymour
In this contest, Republican Ulysses S. Grant opposed Horace Seymour, the Democratic governor of New York. Their respective running mates were Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax of Indiana and Francis P. Blair of Missouri. The Democrats attacked the Republican management of Reconstruction and black suffrage. Grant, a moderate on Reconstruction, was accused of military despotism and anti-Semitism, and Colfax, of nativism and possible corruption. Besides criticizing Seymour’s support for inflationary greenback currency and Blair’s reputed drunkenness and his opposition to Reconstruction, the Republicans questioned the wartime patriotism of all Democrats.

Grant won the popular vote, 3,012,833 to 2,703,249, and carried the electoral college by 214 to 80. Seymour carried only eight states, but ran fairly well in many others, especially in the South. The election showed that despite his popularity as a military hero, Grant was not invincible. His margin of victory came from newly enfranchised southern freedmen, who supplied him with about 450,000 votes. The Democrats had named a weak ticket and attacked Reconstruction rather than pursuing economic issues, but revealed surprising strength.

ELECTION OF 1872

Ulysses S. Grant vs. Horace Greeley
President Ulysses S. Grant ran against New YorkTribune editor Horace Greeley in 1872. Greeley headed an uneasy coalition of Democrats and liberal Republicans. Despite Greeley’s history of attacking Democrats, that party endorsed him for the sake of expediency. The vice-presidential candidates were Republican senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri.

Disaffected by Grant administration corruption and the controversy over Reconstruction, Greeley ran on a platform of civil service reform, laissez-faire liberalism, and an end to Reconstruction. The Republicans came out for civil service reform and the protection of black rights. They attacked Greeley’s inconsistent record and his support of utopian socialism and Sylvester Graham’s dietary restrictions. Thomas Nast’s anti-Greeley cartoons in Harper’s Weekly attracted wide attention.

Grant won the century’s biggest Republican popular majority, 3,597,132 to 2,834,125. The electoral college vote was 286 to 66. Actually, the result was more anti-Greeley than pro-Grant.

ELECTION OF 1876

Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden
In 1876 the Republican party nominated Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio for president and William A. Wheeler of New York for vice president. The Democratic candidates were Samuel J. Tilden of New York for president and Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana for vice president. Several minor parties, including theProhibition party and the Greenback party, also ran candidates.

The country was growing weary of Reconstruction policies, which kept federal troops stationed in several southern states. Moreover, the Grant administration was tainted by numerous scandals, which caused disaffection for the party among voters. In 1874 the House of Representatives had gone Democratic; political change was in the air.

Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, receiving 4,284,020 votes to 4,036,572 for Hayes. In the electoral college Tilden was also ahead 184 to 165; both parties claimed the remaining 20 votes. The Democrats needed only 1 more vote to capture the presidency, but the Republicans needed all 20 contested electoral votes. Nineteen of them came from South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida–states that the Republicans still controlled. Protesting Democratic treatment of black voters, Republicans insisted that Hayes had carried those states but that Democratic electors had voted for Tilden.

Two sets of election returns existed–one from the Democrats, one from the Republicans. Congress had to determine the authenticity of the disputed returns. Unable to decide, legislators established a fifteen-member commission composed of ten congressmen and five Supreme Court justices. The commission was supposed to be nonpartisan, but ultimately it consisted of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. The final decision was to be rendered by the commission unless both the Senate and the House rejected it. The commission accepted the Republican vote in each state. The House disagreed, but the Senate concurred, and Hayes and Wheeler were declared president and vice president.

In the aftermath of the commission’s decision, the federal troops that remained in the South were withdrawn, and southern leaders made vague promises regarding the rights of the 4 million African-Americans living in the region.

ELECTION OF 1880

James A. Garfield vs. Winfield Scott Hancock
The election of 1880 was as rich in partisan wrangling as it was lacking in major issues. Factional rivalry in the Republican party between New York senator Roscoe Conkling’s Stalwarts and Half-Breed followers of James G. Blaine resulted in a convention in which neither Blaine nor the Stalwart choice, former president Ulysses S. Grant, could gain the nomination. On the thirty-sixth ballot, a compromise choice, Senator James A. Garfield of Ohio, was nominated. StalwartChester A. Arthur of New York was chosen as his running mate to mollify Conkling’s followers. The Democrats selected Civil War general Winfield Scott Hancock, a man of modest abilities, because he was less controversial than party leaders like Samuel Tilden, Senator Thomas Bayard, or Speaker of the House Samuel Randall. Former Indiana congressman William English served as Hancock’s running mate.

In their platforms, both parties equivocated on the currency issue and unenthusiastically endorsed civil service reform, while supporting generous pensions for veterans and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. The Republicans called for protective tariffs; the Democrats favored tariffs “for revenue only.”

In the campaign, Republicans “waved the bloody shirt,” ridiculed Hancock for referring to the tariff as a “local question,” and quite possibly purchased their narrow but crucial victory in Indiana. Democrats attacked Garfield’s ties to theCrédit Mobilier scandal and circulated the forged “Morey Letter” that “proved” he was soft on Chinese exclusion. Turnout was high on election day (78.4 percent), but the result was one of the closest in history. Garfield carried the electoral college, 214-155, but his popular majority was less than 10,000 (4,454,416 to Hancock’s 4,444,952). Greenback-Labor candidate James Weaver garnered 308,578 votes. Outside the southern and border states, Hancock carried only New Jersey, Nevada, and 5 of 6 California electoral votes.