The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race by Donald Ratcliffe (review)

In a solid contribution to the University Press of Kansas’s American Presidential Elections series, The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race takes a fresh look at the complicated election of 1824. With his subject boasting five candidates, no strong national political parties, and a variety of different voting procedures, Donald Ratcliffe organizes his research into a readable narrative and recasts the election as being about the issues confronting Americans in the often neglected early 1820s and not about Andrew Jackson and his brand of democracy.

The election of 1824 is often portrayed as a contest among personalities and the story of Andrew Jackson. Certainly, any contest among John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, William Harris Crawford, and Jackson would be lively, but Ratcliffe shifts the focus from personality to the issues. The election, Ratcliffe observes, was not about democracy but about the role of political parties. Americans debated the merits of internal improvements, tariffs, and slavery’s expansion, and whether other sections supported their own policy priorities. It was not clear where all the candidates stood on all the issues, except for maybe Calhoun and Clay. Because of fractured interests, ambiguity was an advantage. Candidates faced difficulties building an electoral coalition broad enough to win the presidency. The election also saw new campaign techniques, including the first campaign biography, straw polls, statewide nominating conventions, political cartoons, and policy platforms.

Ratcliffe divides his book into two parts. In Part 1, “Candidates and Constituents,” he devotes each chapter to a different personality and thus covers each section of the Union. Adams was New England’s candidate. Clay competed with Jackson in the Old Southwest and with Adams in the Old Northwest. Calhoun, Crawford, and Jackson vied for supremacy in the South. Each candidate faced considerable obstacles to broadening his appeal. Ratcliffe explains local politics, voters’ immediate concerns, the general “mood of discontent,” the role of the congressional caucus, and the use of partisan techniques (p. 17). In Part 2, “Campaigns and Coalitions,” Ratcliffe examines in great detail how the election played out in Washington, D.C., and the states. He divides his discussion of the states by how they chose their delegates to the Electoral College—by popular election or state legislature. Ratcliffe makes the case that in the states where the legislature made the choice Adams would have won a popular vote, especially in New York. He breaks down the votes in an appendix. Each chapter explores common themes of local politics, new campaign techniques, political parties, policy, and the interplay of local and national politics.

In his final chapter, Ratcliffe convincingly debunks “the corrupt bargain.” He argues congressmen stuck to their states’ choice and voted accordingly. Even before the infamous meeting between Clay and Adams, many western states decided that a New Englander would be friendlier to their concerns than a southerner. In fact, unlike Jackson, Adams and his supporters worked hard to win the election in the House. Adams successfully put together a winning coalition. For Ratcliffe, the question was not who would win, but what shape Adams’s coalition would take—whether it would include Crawford, Clay, or Jackson supporters. Adams was everyone’s second choice, and most likely had the support of the majority of not just the states but the people as well.

Ratcliffe explains the election of 1824 within the context of the politics of the early 1820s, a period often overlooked by historians, when the country was dealing with the aftermath of the Missouri Compromise and recovering from an economic crisis. One quibble is that Ratcliffe is too cautious about the relationship between local and national politics. It is good to remember that the election was not simply a precursor to Jacksonian America but a significant step in terms of introducing new...