The one contender who had most definitely anticipated an inconclusive outcome to the Election of 1824 – indeed, counted on it – was Henry Clay, who was then serving as Speaker of the House. With four men in the race and Jackson poised to swallow up an otherwise unforeseen portion of the voting public’s increasingly rapturous support, Clay shrewdly predicted that no one of them could possibly have hoped to secure the necessary votes in the Electoral College to declare victory in the first instance. No, the canny Kentuckian surmised, the race would certainly fall to the House of Representatives to settle, and therein lay the great advantage of Henry Clay. As Speaker, it would be a relatively simple matter for him to maneuver the various delegations into voting as he saw fit. So long as he came in third or better in the initial contest – in keeping with the 12th Amendment’s provision that the House must choose from among, “The persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President” – Clay could therefore effectively anoint himself. With Crawford, to his eyes, the least popular of the three – and with the man having suffered a rather sever stroke in 1823 – the Speaker was accordingly assured that the office of President was as good as his. So crushing a disappointment it was, then, when Clay was the one who came in forth. Thus excluded from the contingent election which he had envisioned as his own coronation, Clay was accordingly left in the position of choosing whom among the men he had lately anticipated defeating would instead take his place as the President of the United States.
While the resulting decision was a fairly
bitter one for Clay, it did not prove, ultimately, to be a very hard one. The
Speaker would certainly not hand the presidency to Crawford, a man whose
politics he disagreed with and whose health had just been exposed as being
alarmingly precarious. And for Jackson, Clay had nothing but venom and
recrimination. Writing to one of the future founders of the anti-slavery
Republican Party, Francis Preston Blair (1791-1876), Clay tellingly called into
question the competency of the popular Tennessean on February 29th,
a little less than three weeks after the contingent vote was held. “I cannot
believe [,]” he said, “That killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies
for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.”
Jackson, in Clay’s mind, was a demagogue in the making, a kind of folksy Caesar
who, if given the chance, would claim the backing of the people as an excuse to
violate any law or regulation which he deemed to be burdensome. Such a man, who
also displayed an unambiguous desire to tear down the nation’s entire financial
system, could not possibly be permitted to wield the powers of Chief Executive.
This left Adams, of course, as the only viable choice, a man whose temperament
and approach to politics were not at all like those of Clay. And yet, in spite
of their differences, Clay and Adams were more aligned in terms of policy than
not. Both men believed in the efficacy of high tariffs and central banking, and
furthermore regarded the ideal character of the federal government as being
regulatory, constructive, and fundamentally activist. Yes, Clay could deal with
Adams, perhaps even develop a partnership. And so, on the first ballot
on February 9th, 1825 – truly a testament to Clay’s influence in the
chamber – the House voted, by state delegation, to elect John Quincy Adams as
President.
Jackson, of course, was shocked and
outraged by the sudden reversal of his fortunes. Going into the contingent
election, he had assumed – not unreasonably – that his first-place finish in
terms of both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote would incline the
assembled Congressmen to vote in his favor. Granted, the percentage of the
popular vote he had secured was significantly lower than a majority – coming in
at around forty-two percent – but if any one of the three remaining contenders had
to be declared the victor, selecting Jackson would assuredly have been the most
in keeping with the popular will. There was some warning, it must be said, that
this might not have been the final outcome. Shortly before the House assembled,
a Philadelphia newspaper called the Columbian Observer published an
anonymous statement from a supposed member of Congress who wished his
countrymen to know that a clandestine bargain was afoot. Speaker Clay, he said,
had already made a deal with Secretary Adams, the substance of which was that
the former would anoint the latter in exchange for an appointment as Secretary
of State. Nothing came of this claim at the time – no investigation was launched;
the author’s identity was never sought – but time would soon enough prove that
there was very likely something to it. For indeed, once having convened, the
House did determine to elect John Quincy Adams to the office of President. And
Adams, a short time later, did offer to make Clay his Secretary of State.
Notwithstanding the appearance of corruption, Clay decided to accept the offer.
Clay might have declined, of course, while
protesting his innocence, but this was very unlikely to make the accusations go
away. And so, as long as he was going to be accused of corruption no matter
what, it seemed to him the only logical choice to accept the most prestigious
position in the incoming president’s cabinet. Given the number of recent
presidents who had ascended to that position from the State Department –
including Madison, Monroe, and now Adams – the offer was also more than a
little bit auspicious. Naturally, Jackson was furious. Clearly, the election
had been stolen from him. Clearly, Clay and Adams had made a “corrupt bargain”
to rob the American people of their preferred candidate for the highest office.
Such rank corruption was intolerable, made that much worse by how blatantly it
had been committed. It was a question of fear, of course. The elites – the
money men, the bankers, the speculators, and the crypto-monarchists – had
conspired to defraud the American public because they all feared what Jackson
might do once in power. They feared for the 2nd BUS, which Jackson
openly despised, and coveted the power it gave them over the lowly farmers and
merchants that were rapidly settling in the West. And they feared his populism
and his hatred of corruption and his dedication to Jeffersonian principles. In
short, he terrified them in every aspect, and so they put him in his place.
Adams was their man – their puppet – and Clay their willing tool. Between them,
rest assured, the country was bound for four years of misery.
Such were doubtless the bitter reflections
of a man who just had the presidency seemingly snatched from his hands. In
point of fact, neither Clay nor Adams had done anything that could possibly have
been construed as either illegal or unconstitutional. The Constitution gives
the House of Representatives the right to settle inconclusive presidential
elections. And in 1824, Clay was the Speaker of the House. Should he have
allowed the various state delegations to vote as their members preferred
without interference? Perhaps so. Jackson had secured more popular votes
and more electoral votes than any of his fellow candidates. And while this did
not entitle him to an automatic elevation to the presidency, it did make
for a strange outcome that the single man preferred by more of the voters than
any other ultimately came in second to the runner up. But was it really a
corrupt bargain that produced this result? As aforementioned, Adams was the
only person Clay was particularly inclined to support. Why, then, should he not
have attempted to use the legitimate power at his disposal to grant the New
Englander a victory? And why, having secured said victory, should Adams not
have granted the key position in his cabinet to the most powerful and
influential statesmen with whom he had the most principles in common? Who else,
in short, but Henry Clay, was John Quincy Adams supposed to choose? The whole
exchange was a little less than democratic in the strictest sense of the term,
to be sure. But it was also unambiguously the product of the laws and
constitution of the United States of America.
What does bear asking, however – to get back,
finally, to the topic of the present discussion – is whether or not the 20th
Amendment would have changed the outcome of the vote in the House. As it stood,
the outgoing members – with Henry Clay at the head of them – were the ones
tasked with determining which of the three men would ultimately claim the
office of President. And this fact, as aforementioned, gave Clay a tremendous
advantage. As Speaker of the House – a position to which he had been most
recently elected in 1823 – he held tremendous sway over the goings-on in the
lower chamber of Congress. In fact, by placing his allies in key committee
positions, frequently taking part in floor debates, and deftly controlling the
legislative agenda, Clay had actually helped to expand the power of the office
itself, making the Speaker something more like an independent and equal rival
to the President of the United States than a mere functionary of Congress. What
this meant in practice, of course, is that Clay had a great many strings to
pull when the House convened to hold a contingent election in February of 1825.
Two years into his latest tenure in office, many men doubtless owed him favors
or else were eager to cultivate his patronage. Some of them, to be sure, would
not have counted themselves among his allies. But then many of those same men
were likely beholden to the Speaker anyway. Being, as he was, the most powerful
man in the chamber, Clay was almost certainly the recipient of a great deal of
information about his fellow members. Who sought re-election and who didn’t;
who had mistresses, or illegitimate children; who owed money, and to whom, and
how much; all such bits and pieces of gossip were bound to find their way to
the Speaker’s office eventually, and in his hands, they surely did not go to any
waste. Clay, in short, was ideally situated to decide the outcome of the
contingent vote, a state of affairs in no small part made possible by the fact
that, at that moment, he was at the end of his latest tenure and at the height
of his considerable powers.
Consider, however, the potential outcome if
it had been the incoming House that was summoned on February 9th,
1825. In actual fact, this gathering of Congressmen did not meet until December
of 1825, some eight months after the inauguration of John Quincy Adams as
president. By that time, the results of the contingent election had effectively
split the Democratic-Republican Party into two mutually antagonistic factions.
There were the “anti-Jackson” men, being those who supported President Adams
and favored the kind of economic nationalism espoused by him and his Secretary
of State, and there were the Jacksonians, being those who believed that the 2nd
BUS and its attendant financial system were corrupting the nation’s spirit.
Over the course of Adams’ four years in office, these two informal groupings
would slowly but surely evolve into two distinct and increasingly formalized
political parties. The anti-Jacksonians would eventually become known as the
National Republican Party, adopting a name which sought to emphasize both their
ties to the Jeffersonian Republican Party and their tendency to view most
policy questions as having truly national answers. And the Jacksonians,
meanwhile, evolved into the Democratic Party, likewise rebranding themselves in
an attempt to draw attention to their purported values – in this case, populism
and the popular direction of public policy.
Based solely on this realignment of the
political status quo – and bearing in mind that contingent elections are
carried by a majority vote of the state delegations – Jackson would
likely still have lost. As of December 5th, 1825 – being the first
full session of the 19th Congress – nine state delegations were
controlled by the Jacksonians while thirteen were controlled by the
Anti-Jacksonians. But if the incoming House had met in January instead of
December – in time enough, that is, to count the votes of the Electoral College
– then the spilt in the Democratic-Republican Party would not yet have
happened. The newly-elected Congressmen – along with their counterparts in the
Senate – would have assembled, been sworn in, and then proceeded to count the
relevant ballots. The impasse which would trigger the contingent vote would at
this stage become apparent, thereby almost certainly beginning the process by
which the various Representatives would begin to sort themselves. But without a
Speaker – Clay’s tenure having ended with the previous Congress and another
election having yet to be held – and without committees – the principal tool by
which Clay engendered loyalty and exerted influence – one wonders just how much
power the venerable Kentuckian would have been able to wield. He would still
have been Henry Clay, of course, a veteran former Speaker and most likely to
hold that same post once again. There would surely have been any number of his
fellow Congressmen who still owed him favors or were eager to owe him in the
future. But between the turnover resulting from the election in November and
the fact that whatever power Clay could claim was essentially
theoretical, the elevation of John Quincy Adams would not necessarily have been
inevitable.
Consider, for example, the basic math with
which Clay would have been confronted in the event he decided to run for
another term as Speaker. According to the factional affiliations of the 19th
Congress, there were one hundred and six Jacksonians and one hundred and seven
anti-Jacksonians seated in the House of Representatives. Keeping in mind that
these tallies embody the partisan standing of the lower chamber several months
into the presidency of John Quincy Adams, it would seem reasonable to
characterize the likely balance of power as of February, 1825 as being well
within the margin of error. As Speakers are elected by a simple majority vote,
this would accordingly call into question the ability of Henry Clay to secure
another term in that coveted office. His previous term having ended, therefore,
and the viability of another term potentially in doubt, Clay might well have
found himself in an unusual position of weakness. If all one hundred and six
men who would later declare themselves to be Jacksonians were determined not to
elect Clay to the speakership in the event that he ran for another term, and if
these one hundred and six men were able to convince a single
anti-Jacksonian-to-be to follow suit, Clay would thus have been robbed of his
ability to promise future committee assignments to those Representatives who
did not already owe him favors. This would presumably leave only the returning
Congressmen already in Clay’s orbit securely in his pocket – that being,
presumably, a smaller total number than at the end of the previous Congress.
Thus deprived of the influence over the House to which he had become
accustomed, it would accordingly seem to be something of an open question
whether Clay could have produced the victory for Adams with which we are
familiar or if the supporters of Jackson could have rallied in order to usher
him into the White House four years ahead of schedule.
Upon reflection, robbing Henry Clay of the
power which he had accrued over his previous term as Speaker within the context
of a contingent vote for president would rather seem to be the point of the 20th
Amendment to the Constitution. Not specifically, of course, but according to
the spirit of the thing. The fundamental purpose of the 20th
Amendment is to prevent lame duck public servants – and specifically those who
have recently been defeated at the polls – from exercising undue influence over
the public policy decisions of the present moment. The rationale behind this,
of course, is that elections represent a survey of the general public opinion.
In the aftermath of an election, results dictate causality. If enough
incumbents are defeated as to usher a new party into power, the kinds of
policies thereafter to be pursued will doubtless undergo a change. And if the
party in power manages to hold onto its position, then the policies already
being pursued are more than likely to remain unchanged. In either case, the
outcome of an election determines what happens immediately thereafter. This, in
the modern sense of the term, is the essence of electoral democracy. In keeping
with this logic, then, allowing policy decisions to be made according to the
results of a previous election rather than the most recent election would
seem to be definitionally undemocratic. This becomes particularly apparent in moments
of unexpected crisis. If, immediately following an election, a national
emergency should occur whose implications for the future are potentially quite severe,
it would seem particularly undesirable to vest decision-making authority in a
group of statesmen and public servants whom the people may just have roundly
rejected at the polls. Elections, of course, don’t always result in massive
turnover. Indeed, sometimes they change hardly anything at all. But since at
other times they give expression to massive shifts in public opinion and public
trust, good election policy must take full account of the possible as well as
the practical. That is to say, the laws and regulations surrounding elections
must ensure that lame ducks are able to effect significant and lasting policy
change as infrequently as is practicable.
In some ways, to be sure, this is easier
said than done. National elections, ironically enough, often tend to be very
local affairs, with candidates typically staying physically within the relevant
electoral districts until a victor is finally declared. For a particularly
large nation like the United States of America, this means – and had always
meant – that there must be a kind of latency period between the final
certification of an election and the swearing-in of the victors. Quite simply, people
need time to get from their constituency offices to the seat of government,
necessitating, in the interim, the continuation in office of the outgoing class
of elected officials. But while this state of affairs may be functionally
unavoidable, steps can be – and have been – taken in order to minimize the
likelihood of certain undesirable outcomes. If, for example, national elections
are held in November, thus placing them in close proximity to a relatively
dense block of public holidays, it might perhaps make more sense to schedule
the necessary swearing-in ceremonies as early as possible in January rather
than in the first week of March. Some amount of delay is inevitable, as
aforementioned, and it simply wouldn’t be reasonable to expect newly elected
public officials to report for work in the midst of the Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and New Year’s season. But there would seem to be no reason at all
to extend the lame duck period almost into the early spring. Just so, if the
lower house of the national legislature is going to maintain the responsibility
of deciding the outcome of a disputed presidential election – a decision, it
would seem fair to say, of potentially monumental significance – the summoning
of said house should be so timed as to occur after its members were most
recently sworn in.
At the moment in time in which the House of
Representatives was summoned to hold a contingent election in February of 1825,
Henry Clay was indisputably its most powerful single member. Having served in
the office of Speaker for a cumulative period of ten years – his most recent tenure
having commenced in 1823 – he had a great many allies among his fellow
Congressmen, wielded tremendous influence over the various committees on which
they sat, and could, without much trouble, preemptively determine how any given
vote was going to come off. In spite of all of this, however, Clay, like any
public official, was still fundamentally beholden to the whims of the
electorate. Not just the voters in his home state of Kentucky, of course, but
the majority of House members whose support he needed if he was to maintain his
position as that chamber’s presiding officer. With every biennial election, the
composition of the House was refreshed. And just so, with every refreshment, a
new vote for Speaker was required to be held. As the House is intended to
represent the priorities and desires of the American people as accurately as
possible, so the Speaker is supposed to embody the kind of leadership the House
desires for itself as accurately as possible. Allowing Henry Clay, as Speaker,
to preside over the 1825 contingent election for president accordingly
represented a break with this otherwise very durable rationale.
As of February 9th, 1825, the
most recent national election had been held only two months previously. There
existed, therefore, effectively two parallel Congresses. The first, the sitting
Congress, had been elected in November of 1822 and had chosen Henry Clay as its
Speaker upon being sworn in on March 4th, 1823. The second, of
course, was the incoming Congress, whose members had been elected in November
of 1824 and who had yet to sworn in or to choose a presiding officer. Presumably,
the incoming Congress more accurately represented the intentions and desires of
the American people as of February, 1825 than the body of legislators chosen
some two years previously. And while it was entirely possible – in not, indeed,
quite likely – that the newly sworn-in Congressmen would have opted to select
Henry Clay once again as their presiding officer, this was not necessarily a
guaranteed outcome. If, in keeping with the dictates of electoral democracy,
the American people had just recently been polled so as to determine, as
accurately as possible, their desired occupant of the office of President, why
shouldn’t the incoming House – also recently elected – have been granted the
attendant responsibility of settling an electoral impasse? Why, in essence, did
the power of selection in the event of an inconclusive vote devolve upon a body
whose credentials had arguably just expired? Henry Clay was indeed the choice
of the representatives of the American people as of 1823, but why should this
have entitled him to continue wielding as much power as he did several months
after the election of a body of men who might have declined to elect him once
given the choice? The plain fact of the 20th Amendment would seem to
answer all of these questions, albeit somewhat belatedly. Lame duck public
officials should not be able to make such tremendously important
decisions. And while crises cannot always be satisfactorily predicted, their
worst effects can be mitigated with a little thoughtful planning.
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