alternatehistory.com
#2: No Country for Literate Men
A House Divided #2: No Country for Literate Men
“May our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.”
***
From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books
1828: The Rematch
The 1828 presidential election marked the start of a pattern that would continue in presidential politics until the Mexican War and the rise of the “Young Americans”. Incumbent President John Quincy Adams, a scion of one of Boston's oldest and most prominent political families (indeed, his own father had been President – see 1796), had served a controversial four years since the even more controversial 1824 election, and the belief that he and Henry Clay had conspired to steal the election lingered despite all evidence to the contrary. Andrew Jackson, the winner of the popular vote (though loser of the contingent vote) in 1824, had spent Adams' term building up support for a second run at the presidency, and from as early as 1825 (when the legislature of his home state of Tennessee passed a resolution nominating him for President) his candidacy was seen as a given. Adams, being the incumbent, was an equally obvious candidate, and though both men's supporters had congressional and electoral organisations (still unnamed by this point – the labels “Democratic” and “Republican” [1] would only arise in the 1830 midterm campaign), no formal nominations were actually carried out – the only time in post-Washington American history that this has occurred [2].
The campaign was extremely spirited, in contrast to most previous ones, and saw Adams supporters attack Jackson for being a barbaric illiterate unfit to govern the country, and Jackson supporters strike back against Adams for being an out-of-touch Massachusetts elite who was closer to the British than his own people. Undoubtedly they were helped in this by the signing of the Clay–Vaughan Treaty just a month before the election, which angered the West in particular for giving up rightful American soil – however, Maine hailed Adams as a national hero for successfully pushing their territorial claim. The other main achievement of the Adams administration, the Tariff of 1828, was opposed sternly by many Southern Jacksonians (notably incumbent Vice President and Jackson running mate John Calhoun), although Jackson himself ominously neglected to take a stand either way…
…The 1828 election was undoubtedly the most democratic ever held in the United States at the time. New York, Vermont, Georgia and Louisiana having moved from having electors chosen by their state legislatures to having them elected by general suffrage since 1824, only Delaware and South Carolina now neglected to hold direct presidential votes. And suffrage rights were expanding as well – the only states that retained absolute property qualifications for white men were Rhode Island, New Jersey and Tennessee, although several more states had harsher voting requirements for free blacks. Overall, some two million people had the vote in 1828, and of them, roughly three fifths turned out to vote for President – well over three times as many as had voted in 1824.
View attachment 283548
[3]
The result of the 1828 elections was relatively unsurprising – Adams' backing in the Northeast wasn't enough to save him, and on the back of strong support from the South and West, Andrew Jackson entered the White House as the first US President not born into wealth, and the first whose home state was neither Virginia nor Massachusetts… [4]
View attachment 283544
***
From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press
Jackson's inauguration was quite unlike that of any previous President. For the first time, the inaugural ceremony was held on the outside of the Capitol, on the East Portico, and the east lawn was filled with over twenty thousand eager spectators. Jackson, who had already entertained crowds of supporters along the three-week steamboat and carriage journey from Nashville to the capital, arrived on foot and entered the Capitol through a side door to avoid the crowd, before emerging on the portico, taking the inaugural oath administered by Chief Justice Marshall before giving his inaugural address. Although spectators describe the crowd as reverently silent throughout the speech, in this period before electric sound amplification, any attempts to pick up his words outside the immediate vicinity of the stairs would have been utterly in vain.
By the time Jackson was finished speaking, the crowd was beginning to break through the barrier placed on the Capitol stairs, and the President of the United States was forced to flee his own inauguration by running through the Capitol rotunda, mounting a horse readied for this purpose on the west lawn, and riding post-haste toward the White House. However, he would find scant calm there either. Seeing himself very much as a man of the people, Jackson had made a symbolic decision that his inaugural festivities should be open to everyone regardless of social status, and issued an invitation to the general public to visit the White House after the inauguration. A great many people had taken him up on his offer, and to the delight of many Republicans, the crowd quickly descended into a drunken mob that caused several thousand dollars of damage to the building, mostly in broken china. Jackson himself was forced to escape through a window and beat a hasty retreat across the Potomac to Alexandria, where he spent the night at Gadsby's Hotel… [5]
…In his inaugural address, Jackson had set out “the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands” and added that he would “endeavor to select men whose diligence and talents will insure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation, depending for the advancement of the public service more on the integrity and zeal of the public officers than on their numbers”. What this meant in practical terms was that Jackson tried to prevent institutional corruption by rotating officeholders and making sure no federal civil servant held any one position long enough to build a power base. Ironically, this intended anti-corruption measure, in giving rise to the tradition of presidential appointments to the federal civil service, did more than any other single act to give rise to the “spoils system” that characterized American political life for much of the 19th century...
***
From “A History of the Native Americans”
(c) 2001 by Arthur Lewis
Talikwa: Cherokee Publishers
In terms of his policy toward the Native nations, Andrew Jackson remains something of an enigma. It's highly likely that he held our kind in low regard – for evidence to this effect one need look no further than the Seminole War of 1818, when then-General Jackson exceeded orders to drive the Seminole out of U.S. Soil, massacring a large number of people and proceeding to invade Florida and create a diplomatic incident with Spain. Moreover, he made his opinion of Native culture fairly clear when, in an address to Congress in 1830, he asked “what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than twelve million happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Jackson appears to have felt some degree of concern toward the impending doom of the Southeastern Native nations, for while President he championed not their extermination, but their relocation to lands west of the Mississippi – given the geography of the US at the time, this likely would've meant what is today the state of Cimarron – in the vainglorious hope that they might escape white violence there. In the spring of 1830, Senator White of Tennessee introduced legislation endorsed by Jackson that would've permitted the federal government to undertake such an expulsion, causing a long-drawn Congressional debate that hinged largely on the limits of federal authority…
…While the bill sailed through the Senate, over the objections of men like Frelinghuysen, the House of Representatives, which was more weighted toward the more populous northern states, was a different matter. There was great consternation in the House over the provisions of the bill, particularly the article that would've allowed the President to call up state militias to escort those natives who would move, with a strong implication that they might also be used to coerce those who would not [6]. This elicited strong opposition from the North in particular, and the bill ended up failing by a margin of two votes… [7]
…As feared by proponents of the Indian Removal Bill, its failure to pass resulted in the states taking matters into their own hands. In August of 1830, Governor Gabriel Moore of Alabama signed a law dividing the remaining Muscogee lands in his state up into counties and opening it to white settlement – when the Muscogee protested, their case was not heard, and when white settlers started moving in, hundreds if not thousands of Muscogee were massacred…
…Georgia attempted to push similar measures against the Cherokee, who occupied land Georgians felt important to connect their state to the burgeoning West, and to that effect issued legislation in 1828 depriving the Cherokee of their rights to autonomy in the state [8], clearly aiming to have them removed wholesale – however, the Cherokee were more adept at defending themselves than the Muscogee, and brought a case before the Supreme Court to indict Georgia for transgressing on their treaty rights. The Court declined to hear the case, citing their belief that the Cherokee were not a “foreign nation” and as such could not sue a state in a direct sense, but reserved itself by stating that “in a case with proper parties”, it might be sympathetic to the Cherokee's case. Such a case would not appear until 1832, when a missionary by the name of Samuel Worcester sued the State of Georgia for its law that forbade any non-native from entering native lands without permission from the state. Chief Justice Marshall, supported by five out of six associate justices then on the bench, ruled that this was a violation of tribal sovereignty, and that no individual state had the authority to make rulings over Native nations. However, for all that this appeared to be a victory, the Court had no way to enforce it in practice, and repression against the Cherokee would continue for several years…
***
[1] The Republicans are largely the OTL Whigs, though their membership is somewhat different from OTL. See future updates.
[2] It's true that the 1824 election was largely fought on a nonpartisan basis, but the Democratic-Republican Party did hold a nominating caucus, which was sparsely attended and ended up nominating William Crawford, who came third and was promptly trounced at the contingent election.
[3] The changes from OTL here are mostly cosmetic – Adams gains slightly in the Northeast while Jackson gains slightly elsewhere – but because the states pushed toward Adams are largely bigger, this means Adams actually gains almost thirty thousand votes. The only state that actually flips as a result of this is Maryland, but since they chose electors by district rather than statewide, this means only three of the state's eleven electors change allegiance, and three electors flipping the other way in New York and Maine means that the electoral vote divides exactly as IOTL.
[4] Obviously this is also true of OTL – it would also be entirely legitimate to say Jackson was the first president to neither be a Virginian nor have the surname “Adams”.
[5] This all happened IOTL. You can imagine the contrast against Adams' inauguration, which took place inside the House of Representatives and was followed by a relatively low-key ball for federal employees and the DC social register.
[6] This was implicit in the OTL Indian Removal Act, but here it's explicitly stated.
[7] IOTL, the bill passed 101-97, with 11 members abstaining. ITTL, a few more northern members who abstained IOTL were persuaded to side against the bill, and the split is 100-102.
[8] This legislation predates the PoD.
“May our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.”
***
From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books
1828: The Rematch
The 1828 presidential election marked the start of a pattern that would continue in presidential politics until the Mexican War and the rise of the “Young Americans”. Incumbent President John Quincy Adams, a scion of one of Boston's oldest and most prominent political families (indeed, his own father had been President – see 1796), had served a controversial four years since the even more controversial 1824 election, and the belief that he and Henry Clay had conspired to steal the election lingered despite all evidence to the contrary. Andrew Jackson, the winner of the popular vote (though loser of the contingent vote) in 1824, had spent Adams' term building up support for a second run at the presidency, and from as early as 1825 (when the legislature of his home state of Tennessee passed a resolution nominating him for President) his candidacy was seen as a given. Adams, being the incumbent, was an equally obvious candidate, and though both men's supporters had congressional and electoral organisations (still unnamed by this point – the labels “Democratic” and “Republican” [1] would only arise in the 1830 midterm campaign), no formal nominations were actually carried out – the only time in post-Washington American history that this has occurred [2].
The campaign was extremely spirited, in contrast to most previous ones, and saw Adams supporters attack Jackson for being a barbaric illiterate unfit to govern the country, and Jackson supporters strike back against Adams for being an out-of-touch Massachusetts elite who was closer to the British than his own people. Undoubtedly they were helped in this by the signing of the Clay–Vaughan Treaty just a month before the election, which angered the West in particular for giving up rightful American soil – however, Maine hailed Adams as a national hero for successfully pushing their territorial claim. The other main achievement of the Adams administration, the Tariff of 1828, was opposed sternly by many Southern Jacksonians (notably incumbent Vice President and Jackson running mate John Calhoun), although Jackson himself ominously neglected to take a stand either way…
…The 1828 election was undoubtedly the most democratic ever held in the United States at the time. New York, Vermont, Georgia and Louisiana having moved from having electors chosen by their state legislatures to having them elected by general suffrage since 1824, only Delaware and South Carolina now neglected to hold direct presidential votes. And suffrage rights were expanding as well – the only states that retained absolute property qualifications for white men were Rhode Island, New Jersey and Tennessee, although several more states had harsher voting requirements for free blacks. Overall, some two million people had the vote in 1828, and of them, roughly three fifths turned out to vote for President – well over three times as many as had voted in 1824.
View attachment 283548
[3]
The result of the 1828 elections was relatively unsurprising – Adams' backing in the Northeast wasn't enough to save him, and on the back of strong support from the South and West, Andrew Jackson entered the White House as the first US President not born into wealth, and the first whose home state was neither Virginia nor Massachusetts… [4]
View attachment 283544
***
From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press
Jackson's inauguration was quite unlike that of any previous President. For the first time, the inaugural ceremony was held on the outside of the Capitol, on the East Portico, and the east lawn was filled with over twenty thousand eager spectators. Jackson, who had already entertained crowds of supporters along the three-week steamboat and carriage journey from Nashville to the capital, arrived on foot and entered the Capitol through a side door to avoid the crowd, before emerging on the portico, taking the inaugural oath administered by Chief Justice Marshall before giving his inaugural address. Although spectators describe the crowd as reverently silent throughout the speech, in this period before electric sound amplification, any attempts to pick up his words outside the immediate vicinity of the stairs would have been utterly in vain.
By the time Jackson was finished speaking, the crowd was beginning to break through the barrier placed on the Capitol stairs, and the President of the United States was forced to flee his own inauguration by running through the Capitol rotunda, mounting a horse readied for this purpose on the west lawn, and riding post-haste toward the White House. However, he would find scant calm there either. Seeing himself very much as a man of the people, Jackson had made a symbolic decision that his inaugural festivities should be open to everyone regardless of social status, and issued an invitation to the general public to visit the White House after the inauguration. A great many people had taken him up on his offer, and to the delight of many Republicans, the crowd quickly descended into a drunken mob that caused several thousand dollars of damage to the building, mostly in broken china. Jackson himself was forced to escape through a window and beat a hasty retreat across the Potomac to Alexandria, where he spent the night at Gadsby's Hotel… [5]
…In his inaugural address, Jackson had set out “the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands” and added that he would “endeavor to select men whose diligence and talents will insure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation, depending for the advancement of the public service more on the integrity and zeal of the public officers than on their numbers”. What this meant in practical terms was that Jackson tried to prevent institutional corruption by rotating officeholders and making sure no federal civil servant held any one position long enough to build a power base. Ironically, this intended anti-corruption measure, in giving rise to the tradition of presidential appointments to the federal civil service, did more than any other single act to give rise to the “spoils system” that characterized American political life for much of the 19th century...
***
From “A History of the Native Americans”
(c) 2001 by Arthur Lewis
Talikwa: Cherokee Publishers
In terms of his policy toward the Native nations, Andrew Jackson remains something of an enigma. It's highly likely that he held our kind in low regard – for evidence to this effect one need look no further than the Seminole War of 1818, when then-General Jackson exceeded orders to drive the Seminole out of U.S. Soil, massacring a large number of people and proceeding to invade Florida and create a diplomatic incident with Spain. Moreover, he made his opinion of Native culture fairly clear when, in an address to Congress in 1830, he asked “what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than twelve million happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Jackson appears to have felt some degree of concern toward the impending doom of the Southeastern Native nations, for while President he championed not their extermination, but their relocation to lands west of the Mississippi – given the geography of the US at the time, this likely would've meant what is today the state of Cimarron – in the vainglorious hope that they might escape white violence there. In the spring of 1830, Senator White of Tennessee introduced legislation endorsed by Jackson that would've permitted the federal government to undertake such an expulsion, causing a long-drawn Congressional debate that hinged largely on the limits of federal authority…
…While the bill sailed through the Senate, over the objections of men like Frelinghuysen, the House of Representatives, which was more weighted toward the more populous northern states, was a different matter. There was great consternation in the House over the provisions of the bill, particularly the article that would've allowed the President to call up state militias to escort those natives who would move, with a strong implication that they might also be used to coerce those who would not [6]. This elicited strong opposition from the North in particular, and the bill ended up failing by a margin of two votes… [7]
…As feared by proponents of the Indian Removal Bill, its failure to pass resulted in the states taking matters into their own hands. In August of 1830, Governor Gabriel Moore of Alabama signed a law dividing the remaining Muscogee lands in his state up into counties and opening it to white settlement – when the Muscogee protested, their case was not heard, and when white settlers started moving in, hundreds if not thousands of Muscogee were massacred…
…Georgia attempted to push similar measures against the Cherokee, who occupied land Georgians felt important to connect their state to the burgeoning West, and to that effect issued legislation in 1828 depriving the Cherokee of their rights to autonomy in the state [8], clearly aiming to have them removed wholesale – however, the Cherokee were more adept at defending themselves than the Muscogee, and brought a case before the Supreme Court to indict Georgia for transgressing on their treaty rights. The Court declined to hear the case, citing their belief that the Cherokee were not a “foreign nation” and as such could not sue a state in a direct sense, but reserved itself by stating that “in a case with proper parties”, it might be sympathetic to the Cherokee's case. Such a case would not appear until 1832, when a missionary by the name of Samuel Worcester sued the State of Georgia for its law that forbade any non-native from entering native lands without permission from the state. Chief Justice Marshall, supported by five out of six associate justices then on the bench, ruled that this was a violation of tribal sovereignty, and that no individual state had the authority to make rulings over Native nations. However, for all that this appeared to be a victory, the Court had no way to enforce it in practice, and repression against the Cherokee would continue for several years…
***
[1] The Republicans are largely the OTL Whigs, though their membership is somewhat different from OTL. See future updates.
[2] It's true that the 1824 election was largely fought on a nonpartisan basis, but the Democratic-Republican Party did hold a nominating caucus, which was sparsely attended and ended up nominating William Crawford, who came third and was promptly trounced at the contingent election.
[3] The changes from OTL here are mostly cosmetic – Adams gains slightly in the Northeast while Jackson gains slightly elsewhere – but because the states pushed toward Adams are largely bigger, this means Adams actually gains almost thirty thousand votes. The only state that actually flips as a result of this is Maryland, but since they chose electors by district rather than statewide, this means only three of the state's eleven electors change allegiance, and three electors flipping the other way in New York and Maine means that the electoral vote divides exactly as IOTL.
[4] Obviously this is also true of OTL – it would also be entirely legitimate to say Jackson was the first president to neither be a Virginian nor have the surname “Adams”.
[5] This all happened IOTL. You can imagine the contrast against Adams' inauguration, which took place inside the House of Representatives and was followed by a relatively low-key ball for federal employees and the DC social register.
[6] This was implicit in the OTL Indian Removal Act, but here it's explicitly stated.
[7] IOTL, the bill passed 101-97, with 11 members abstaining. ITTL, a few more northern members who abstained IOTL were persuaded to side against the bill, and the split is 100-102.
[8] This legislation predates the PoD.
- Utgard96
- Word Count: 2.1k