What happens if Henry Clay got third place in 1824 instead of William Crawford?
According to Robert V. Remini a Clay victory would have been a virtual certainty in that event. "Had he [Clay] received the votes promised to his New York supporters in their secret meeting of November 12 [New York's electors were then chosen by the legislature], he would have replaced Crawford in the House election. *In that case, he would have been elected president--unquestionably.*" (emphasis added) *Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union*, pp. 249-50 At that meeting, the Adams supporters Henry Wheaton and James Tallmadge promised the Clay forces that they would exert a sufficient "influence" on the electors to make sure that Clay would be a candidate in the House.
What happened when the New York electors met on December 1 was bizarre:
(1) one Adams elector switched to Crawford,
(2) one Clay elector went over to Adams,
(3) for some reason, two of Clay's electors didn't show up, and their places were taken by Adams' friends; and finally
(4) one other elector had been subjected to so many threats that out of sheer stubornness or perversity he voted for Andrew Jackson, who was not supposed to have gotten *any* electoral votes from New York.
So instead of New York's votes going 25 to Adams, 7 for Clay, and 4 for Crawford (as had been expected), they went 26 for Adams, 5 for Crawford, 4 for Clay, and 1 for Jackson.
Nor was New York the only state where Clay suffered an unexpected misfortune. In Louisiana, another state where the legislators chose the electors, two of Clay's supporters were injured when their carriage overturned, and could not attend the final voting; three others deserted because of false rumors that Clay had quit the race! The result was that the Adams-Jackson joint ticket won by a vote of 30-28, splitting the state's electors (3 for Jackson, 2 for Adams). So, editorialized the *Argus of Western America*, "while the strongest man in the state got no votes at all, the weakest got *two.* Such is the consequence of political barter."
So what had happened to the New York Adams supporters' promise that they would exert enough "influence" on the electors to make sure that Clay would get enough votes to go into the House? One of them, Thurlow Weed, was later to claim that the pledge of votes to Clay--even the original seven-- was made contingent on Clay's carrying Louisiana, and when he lost Louisiana, "that left our friends free to vote for Mr. Adams." A likely story. In fact, on December 1, when the New York electors voted, they had
no way of knowing that Clay had lost Louisiana--that was not known in the East until December 15 at the earliest.
Anyway, I tend to agree that if Clay had finished third, he would have been elected in the House. For one thing, he had tremendous power there, more than any other Speaker in history. For another, the Crawfordites will not want a deadlock which will make John Calhoun (who would be chosen by the Senate as vice-president) acing president--Calhoun and Crawford hated each other.
I am inclined to think that Clay would be a one-term president, that the Jacksonians for four years would use very similar tactics to those they used against Adams in OTL--they would lambaste the House vote as a flouting of the Will of the People (had not Jackson won both a popular and electoral plurality?) and the product of a Corrupt Bargain. Meanwhile, the tariff would make Clay increasingly unpopular in the South. And to a greater extent than Adams, Clay would be vulnerable to the "character issue"--a widespread belief that he was of "loose morals."