When No Candidate Won the 1824 Presidential Election, the House of Representatives Was Given the Rare Task of Deciding the Victor

The Era of Good Feelings came to a grinding halt with the presidential election of 1824, giving the United States House of Representatives an unprecedented task after electors met on December 1 of that year. For the first and last time ever, the House turned to the 12th Amendment to settle a stalemate in that year’s presidential election—and set the stage for a new era of political vitriol.

The nation’s period of domestic bliss was practically coterminous with the presidency of James Monroe, a Democratic-Republican whose landslide victory in 1816 accelerated the Federalist Party’s collapse. After the ruins of the Federalist Party failed to nominate a single candidate, Monroe won re-election effectively unopposed in the 1820 election.

But the disappearance of “partisan rancor” didn’t bring about political harmony, as historian Lynn Hudson Parsons wrote in The Birth of Modern Politics.

Instead, the 1824 campaign began the moment Monroe was re-elected. Now, Democratic-Republican infighting replaced former animosity with Federalists. To make matters worse, three of Monroe’s five leading opponents were members of his cabinet.

William H. Crawford was treasury secretary and a Georgian who wanted to return to a more strictly traditional vision of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. A planter who enslaved 45 people, Crawford was in favor of states’ rights, slavery and a limited federal government. His strongest support, unsurprisingly, rested in the South.

Election of 1824: When the House Chose

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Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was once a Federalist like his father, second president John Adams. But after switching parties and leading Monroe’s anti-British and isolationist foreign policy agenda, Adams saw his popularity rise, especially in his native New England.

Finally, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina served as Monroe’s secretary of war and was a major proponent of nationalistic westward expansion. But he largely overlapped with Crawford’s staunchly pro-slavery views. He dropped out early in the race after failing to win his home state’s endorsement and pursued the vice presidency instead.

The other two 1824 candidates were Henry Clay, a Kentuckian who served as speaker of the House, and Andrew Jackson, a popular general from Tennessee who defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and billed himself as a true political outsider.

With four major candidates vying for the presidency, no one won a majority of electoral votes.

Jackson had run partially to spite Crawford and Clay, who opposed his rogue invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818, and siphoned their support in the South and West. He ended up with the most electoral votes (99) and popular votes (152,901, or 42.5 percent), but neither was enough. Crawford and Clay won 41 and 37 electoral votes, respectively, and with his base of support in the northeast, Adams won 84.

Based on the protocol outlined in the 12th Amendment, the top three candidates—Jackson, Adams and Crawford—were put before the House of Representatives. Each state’s delegation was allotted one vote. Of the 24 states, a candidate needed 13 to win.

“Now came the round of lobbying congressmen, when Adams came into his own,” wrote historian Daniel Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

Compared with Jackson, an anti-establishment candidate who naturally struggled to court support in Washington, and Crawford, who was incapacitated after a stroke, Adams “understood well this kind of politics, based on an ‘old-boy’ network and implicit understandings,” Howe argued.

Although Clay was kept out of the running, he shifted his support to Adams. Clay’s three votes, along with the seven states Adams won in the Electoral College and three more he secured through backroom politicking, were enough to win Adams the presidency on the first ballot before the House on February 9, 1825.

The Era of Good Feelings was now officially over. An episode of undemocratic politics and a “corrupt bargain” had killed it, and soon enough new parties would form from the rubble of the Democratic-Republican alliance.

Adams appointed Clay secretary of state, and their coalition became the National Republicans, later the Whigs.

Jackson’s contingent, now even more deeply upset with the political establishment and Adams’ “corrupt bargain” came to be known as the Democrats.

Their desire for retribution would turn the next election cycle into one of the most vitriolic in American history—closing the Era of Good Feelings for good.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.