Transcript
The People's Day
March 4, 1829
March 4, 1829. Ten to twenty thousand people wait outside the Capitol.
Andrew Jackson walked here. He takes the oath, then bows to the crowd.
Francis Scott Key It is beautiful, it is sublime!
Then he rode to the President's House, and everyone followed. Calhoun had feared the crowd would break down the rooms at Gadsby's Hotel, so the party moved. Nobody worried about the President's House.
Men in mud-heavy boots stood on satin chairs to see him. Glass broke. Ladies fainted. Somewhere in here is the President.
Then the staff carried tubs of punch out into the garden. The crowd followed the punch, many through the windows. Jackson slipped away to his hotel.
Margaret Bayard Smith But it was the People's day, and the People's President and the People would rule.
The people on the chairs left almost no letters. We see them through their critics' eyes.
In 1800, many of the men in that room could not have voted. By 1840, nearly every white man could. The door swung open. Who got in, and who found it shut?
A Stake in Society
1776–1807
Go back to 1800. Who votes?
Mostly, men who owned land. In Virginia they voted out loud, in front of their neighbors.
The Constitution left voting rules to the states. Nearly all of them drew a line at property or taxes.
The rule had a real argument behind it. John Adams, writing in 1776:
John Adams Very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own.
A man with nothing, he thought, would vote as some man of property told him.
He also warned what would follow.
John Adams There will be no End of it. ... Women will demand a Vote. ... Every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice.
He turned out to be half right.
Many never voted for president at all. In ten of sixteen states, the legislature picked the electors.
The line was mostly about money. In New Jersey, widows and single women with property voted. In several states, so did free Black men who met the rules.
Most men without property waited outside: servants, sailors, sons, hired hands.
Every White Man
1800 – 1843
New states needed settlers. States like Indiana, Illinois, Alabama and Missouri let every adult white man vote. No land required. In a new state, the vote was part of the sales pitch.
Back East, militiamen who'd marched in the War of 1812 wanted the vote, too.
So did the market revolution's wage workers, who owned nothing but their labor.
Old states rewrote their rules. New York's Chancellor James Kent objected:
Chancellor James Kent …we propose to annihilate, at one stroke, all those property distinctions and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage.
He lost. By 1826, almost any white man in New York could vote.
Rhode Island still ran on its royal charter of 1663. Most white men there couldn't vote. A young lawyer, Thomas Dorr, and other reformers answered with the Revolution's own argument.
Thomas Wilson Dorr If it were unjust for our forefathers to be taxed without representation, it is equally unjust for their descendents to be so taxed by their brethren.
By 1842, Rhode Island had two governors. Dorr's men attacked the state arsenal. The cannon wouldn't fire.
The rebellion collapsed, but a new constitution opened the vote. Dorr's People's Convention had voted 46 to 18 to keep Black men out. The new constitution let them vote.
By the 1840s, nearly every white man could vote.
King Caucus
1824 – February 1825
In 1824, one party had to pick a president.
The old way was King Caucus: the party's congressmen picked the nominee for everybody else. Only 66 of Congress's 261 members showed up.
The gallery was fuller than the floor.
The caucus chose William Crawford. Three other Democratic-Republicans ran anyway: Jackson, Adams and Clay.
Jackson won the most votes, popular and electoral. But not a majority.
So the House chose from the top three. Clay came fourth, so he was out. He was also Speaker of the House.
On January 9, Clay asked Adams for a private talk.
Adams's diary calls it 'a long conversation explanatory of the past and prospective of the future.' Clay said he preferred Adams. No job is mentioned.
Adams won on the first ballot, with exactly the thirteen states he needed. Within days, Adams offered Clay Secretary of State.
Andrew Jackson So you see the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.
A corrupt bargain?
Jackson's side called it a corrupt bargain. Nobody has ever proved a deal.
They didn't need proof. The man with the most votes had lost, and his voters remembered.
Hickory
1825 – October 1828
Tennessee nominated Jackson for 1828 in October 1825. Three years early.
His organizer was Martin Van Buren of New York, the Little Magician.
Martin Van Buren We must always have party distinctions…
He wanted an old alliance back:
Martin Van Buren the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the north.
Strong parties, he argued, would keep North and South from splitting over slavery. For about twenty years, they did.
Jackson's nickname was Old Hickory, so Hickory Clubs raised hickory poles, with parades, barbecues and free drinks. Politics became a show, and the show was free.
Jackson's side said Adams had put a gambling table in the President's House. It was a billiard table. He'd paid for it himself.
Adams's side printed the Coffin Handbill: six coffins for six militiamen Jackson had ordered shot. They were Tennessee soldiers, court-martialed for desertion and shot at Mobile in 1815.
Then they went after Rachel Jackson. Her first divorce wasn't final when she married Andrew in 1791.
They married again in 1794. In 1828, the papers called her a bigamist.
Election Day
November 3, 1828 (and 1807–1838)
Canandaigua, New York. Monday, November 3, 1828. The first of three election days.
This year, for the first time, New York's voters choose the state's presidential electors themselves. The whole county's here. Not all of it can vote.
The states that opened the vote to poor white men were closing it to Black men. New Jersey, 1807. Connecticut, 1818. New York, 1821. Tennessee and North Carolina, 1835.
New Jersey's 1807 law ended women's voting, and Black men's, in one phrase: A free, white, male citizen of this state.
In 1838, Pennsylvania wrote one word into its constitution: “white.” Voters approved it by about twelve hundred votes.
Robert Purvis We appeal to you from the decision of the “Reform Convention,” which has stripped us of a right peaceably enjoyed during forty-seven years under the Constitution of this commonwealth.
To the Victor
1828–1832
More than a million men voted for president in 1828. Turnout had more than doubled. Jackson won, 178 electoral votes to 83.
Rachel Jackson died at home on December 22, 1828, weeks after the election. Jackson blamed his enemies for the rest of his life.
Andrew Jackson My heart is nearly broke. I try to summon up my usual fortitude but it is vain.
“A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor.”
Margaret Bayard Smith reported that broken glass and china came to several thousand dollars.
Jackson said long service bred indifference, and any capable citizen could do the work.
Andrew Jackson No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.
He removed about one in ten federal officeholders, many of them postmasters. His loyal supporters got the jobs.
Senator William Marcy of New York put it plainly:
William L. Marcy To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.
Critics called it corruption. It also built parties, because jobs rewarded campaign work.
In 1831, the Anti-Masonic Party held the first national nominating convention. It nominated William Wirt, a former Mason.
The big parties copied it within a year.
By 1832, voters chose presidential electors in every state but one: South Carolina.
A Kind of Tumult
1831–1840
In May 1831, a young French magistrate named Alexis de Tocqueville came to study American prisons. The prison report came first. Democracy in America came next.
Alexis de Tocqueville No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult.
By 1840, 2.4 million men voted for president, four in five of those eligible. Historians still argue whether Jackson opened the door or just walked through it.
Western states wanted settlers. Wage workers and militiamen wanted a say. Parties wanted voters.
Turnout soared. Conventions replaced the caucus. Two national parties fought for every vote.
Women. Nearly all Black men. Native nations. And about two million enslaved people.
Black men won the vote on paper in 1870. Women, in 1920. Native Americans were made citizens in 1924.
On the same square, in June 1873, a judge told a jury to find Susan B. Anthony guilty of voting. She refused to pay the fine.