1828. CHARGES AGAINST ADAMS. 515 dent by capturing St. Marks and Pensacola; with executing Arbuthnot and Ambrister without trial; with banishing citizens of Pensacola on the charge of being spies in time of peace; with unlawfully and arbitrarily forcing Colonel Collaver to surrender archives and documents when Governor of Florida; with placing military above the civil power at New Orleans, and insolently defying a judge; with using profane language; and with hostility to the American system. Adams, on the other hand, was denounced as a monarchist, as an aristocrat, as an old Federalist in disguise, as a man who had changed his party but not his principles, as a ruler above the law and blind to duty. He was charged with assuming power not granted by the Constitution in claiming the right to send Ministers to Panama against the will and without the consent of the Senate. He was charged with causing the loss of the British West Indian trade by mismanagement; with gross extravagance in the expenditure of public money; with having fed all his life at the public crib; with having received such great sums of public money as salaries, outfits, and allowances for the many offices he had held that the grand total was equal to sixteen dollars. for every day of his life since he first drew breath. He was a Northern man from a free State, he had used Federal patronage to influence elections, had corrupted the civil service, had quarrelled with his father, was the friend of duellists, had written a scurrilous poem against Jefferson, was an enemy of the West, and while at St. Petersburg had surrendered a beautiful American servant girl to the Emperor of Russia. The present contest, said one Jackson newspaper, is "a movement of the people," a revolt of democracy against aristocracy. Employed all his life in subordinate stations, it never was the intention of the people to put Adams at the head of the nation. He was born and bred among the aristocracy, and early imbibed those principles against which we fought in the days of the black cockade; he has denied the right of the people to instruct their representatives, authorized useless expenditures, lost us the British colonial VOL. V. trade, hushed up insulted wrongs suffered from Brazil, and left us unrepresented at the Court of St. James. The people have determined on a change, and every good citizen should assist in the great work of reform. Andrew Jackson is of the people, is the candidate of the people, and by the people ought to be elected President of the United States.* A Vermont newspaper, said another, describes the tariff of 1828 as a Jackson tariff "; but in Georgia it is thought oppressive, and the people are called on to set up manufactures in self-defence. Where it is popular the Jacksonians proclaim it; where it is unpopular they denounce it. But for the strong and energetic steps taken by the Jacksonians of the North, said a third, the tariff bill must have failed. To them and to them alone is the credit due of thwarting the combined efforts of the Adams men.‡ The party of the Administration, anxious to have a pretext to censure the Jackson majority, attempted to speak eternally on every subject that could be discussed, and had they not been stopped by the previous question, would have debated the bill till the end of the session, and thus abused the Jacksonians as enemies of the tariff." Utterly at a loss to determine which side Jackson was on, the Senate of Indiana requested the Governor to ask him to state explicitly whether or not he favored internal improvements at Government expense and a tariff for the protection of American manufactures. His answer referred his questioner to a letter written on the very same subject to another inquirer four years before, a letter purposely muddled, vague, and contradictory, which committed him to a "judicious" tariff and left the reader to determine what that was. In the West men believed he meant a tariff for protection, * Ohio Monitor, April 26, 1828. † New England Palladium, June 17, 1828. 1828. Quoted from a Saratoga newspaper by the New England Palladium, June 17, #Ibid., June 20, 1828, quoted from a Kentucky newspaper. Ohio Monitor, April 19, 1828. A Niles's Weekly Register, May 3, 1828, vol. xxxiv, p. 158. ◊ Ibid., vol. xxvi, p. 245, June 24, 1824. This was written to Dr. L. H. Coleman, of North Carolina, and appeared in the Raleigh Star. 1828. THE ELECTION. 517 but in the South they held it to be clear that he stood for a tariff for revenue, because no other was "judicious." As the summer passed, unmistakable signs of what was to come were to be seen on every hand. At raisings, at musters of the militia, at the Court-House during court week, the one cry all over the South and West was "Jackson and Reform." East of the Alleghanies and north of the Potomac river, New York and Maryland were the only doubtful States. In New York, for the first time in her history, the people were to take part in the choice of presidential electors. Her electoral vote was thirty-six, but the number to be chosen by popular vote was thirty-four, and by this body, when assembled, two more were to be elected to represent the United States senators. What would be done in New York city and in the towns and villages of the Hudson river valley was well known. But a belt of New England settlers stretched across the State from Troy to Buffalo, and what they would do was far from certain, for the bitter struggle between the Masons and the Antimasons had greatly complicated the contest for the presidency. The presidential election took place in seven instalments. On the thirty-first day of October Pennsylvania and Ohio chose electors, and both went to Jackson, the one by more than fifty thousand and the other by less than six thousand majority. On the third of November in nine other States, and on the third, fourth, and fifth in New York and in Louisiana, and on the fourth and fifth in New Jersey, the people voted for electors. Elsewhere, save in Delaware and South Carolina, elections were held on the tenth, eleventh, thirteenth, or thirteenth and fourteenth of November. For a few days it seemed as if New York for the second time in her history would cast no vote for President. Thirty-four of her electors were chosen in districts. But when the first returns came in, seventeen were reported carried by Jackson and seventeen by Adams, and as this body was to choose two more electors it was feared that the college would either be unable to organize or unable to elect the two remaining members. In the end Jackson carried eighteen districts and Adams sixteen, and New York's weight in the contest was four votes.* In Georgia, where the action of the President in behalf of the Indians made him bitterly hated, no Adams ticket was nominated and no votes for him were cast. In all the vast stretch of country south of the Potomac and west of Pennsylvania not one elector was secured by Adams. More than eleven hundred and fiftyfive thousand voters went to the polls, and gave Jackson a majority of one hundred and thirty-nine thousand votes. It was indeed a great uprising of the people, a triumph of democracy, another political revolution the like of which the country had not seen since 1800, and no mere driving from office of a man or class of men. To the popular mind it was the downfall of a corrupt and aristocratic Administration that had encroached on the rights of the States and the liberties of the people, and had used the Federal patronage to carry elections and the Federal treasury to reward The effect of a restricted franchise is well shown in Rhode Island, where, with a population of 97,000, but 3,575 votes were cast. 1828. THE TRIUMPH. 519 its followers. As such the victory was hailed with the wildest joy. The people have rallied in their strength, said one journal, and put down the wealth and power of an overbearing aristocracy, the only stay of a corrupt coalition, and restored the administration of the Government to its pristine purity. The same States that voted for Jefferson in 1800 have voted for Jackson in 1828. Those which supported Adams the elder have befriended Adams the younger, with the same result. He may now retire from the strife of parties, and nib his pen for a memoir of his own time, while Mr. Clay broods over his treasonable practices against the will of the people and contrives artifices to rise from his own ruin. Jackson is the President of the people, and as such they will hail him everywhere, not as a god, but as an instrument taken to avenge their wrongs. As the day drew near when he must set out for Washington, towns and cities vied with one another to do him honor. Nashville, Lynchburg, Philadelphia, sought visits from him. The people of Pittsburg tendered a steamboat to carry" the old hero" up the Ohio from Cincinnati. The Legislature of Pennsylvania invited him to Harrisburg, and great preparations were making all over the South and West to celebrate the eighth of January, when the death of Mrs. Jackson changed joy to mourning. The journey of the President-elect from the Hermitage to the Capitol was therefore quiet and uneventful. He reached there while the two Houses were witnessing the count of the electoral vote, and just in time to hear the booming of the guns that announced to the people that he had been declared duly elected President of the United States, and took up his residence at Gadsby's Hotel. There a host of office seekers, office holders, and admirers beset him from morn to eve. The people acted, said one who witnessed the scene, as if the country had been rescued from some great danger,* and came by thousands from every quarter to behold the triumph of their deliverer. The dress, the language, the behavior of the crowd gave vis * Life of Webster. George Tichnor Curtis, vol. i, p. 340. |