Phil and I just got back from Philadelphia. We did a presentation at the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic annual meeting. We were super excited to have so many attend the last session on the last day. Thank you to all of you! The conference was a little retro. Everyone read papers and there wasn’t even a projector on site. I was not aware of this retro theme and made a power point presentation to show off the database. I thought about having everyone gather around my computer but I thought this would be easier.

SHEAR presentation 2008

The 1824 Presidential Election  is one of the most well remembered, primarily because it is the only election ever forced into the House of Representatives because no candidate succeeded in getting a majority of electoral votes (different from the 1800 Presidential Election in which two candidates got a majority, thus forcing the passing of the 12th Amendment).

It’s well described in history:  Andrew Jackson got the most votes (electoral and popular) and won the most states, yet when the House voted, John Quincy Adams won on the first ballot.  Because Henry Clay wasn’t one of the top 3 candidates, he was not in consideration from the House and he threw his support behind Adams, whose politics were not too terribly different from his, and against Jackson (who he personally despised) and after Adams won, he made Clay his Secretary of State, then position then most likely to catapult him into the presidency (Adams had gone from one to the other, as had his two predecessors, Monroe and Madison).  Jackson supporters screamed about a “corrupt bargain” and used that as their slogan four years later and succeeded in getting Jackson into the White House.

However, we might not know quite as much as we think we do.  North Carolina provides some valuable insight into the election in a variety of ways:

1 - At the time several states, including New York, had their electors chosen by the Legislature, thus there was no popular vote.

2 - This is the first election where the popular vote was well tallied and we have individual states’ results readily available, but is that data accurate?  The official data currently found lists Andrew Jackson with 20,231 votes in North Carolina and J.Q. Adams with 0.  However, a careful study of the actual voting sheets from North Carolina and newspapers at the time show that many supporters would have voted for a J.Q. Adams ticket had their been one, and instead voted for the People’s Ticket, a slate of 15 electors, several of whom they hoped would vote for J.Q. Adams in the Electoral College.  Many papers at the time noted that if the Ticket was accurate, 5 of them would vote for Adams instead of Jackson.

3 - Voters back then voted for electors directly, instead of voting for a particular candidate.  But electors could vote for whom they pleased in the actual Electoral College (in Delaware that year, 6 newspapers listed one elector as being a Clay man, and 5 other newspapers listed him as a Crawford man - the elector in question actually voted for Crawford).  In spite of ample support from Adams supporters, all 15 electors elected on the People’s Ticket voted for Jackson.

4 - If Adams supporters had not gone for the People’s Ticket, William Crawford likely would have won the state (his ticket received 15,622 votes).  A switch of those 15 votes ties Adams and Jackson with 84 and takes away Jackson’s argument for having won more electoral votes.  He reached 99 with the help of at least some Adams supporters.

5 - When the election was thrown into the House, North Carolina voted for Crawford.  This was not a surprise, as newspapers were touting that if the election came to the House, then North Carolina would go whole-heartedly for Crawford back when that Congressional Delegation was elected in August, 1823, well over a year before the actual presidential election.

Because of state legislatures electing electors and because of the kind of thing we see in North Carolina, we can not see for certain without more data exactly how the will of the voters played out in 1824.   But we can see that it is not quite the story we have always assumed.

For a spring entry we have Littleberry Bush. He ran for Georgia State Representative from Richmond County in 1823 but lost.

http://elections.lib.tufts.edu/aas_portal/view-election.xq?id=MS115.002.GA.1823.00005

After a some digging I found out that his first name was actually his mother’s maiden name. His father Richard P. Bush married Sara Littleberry in 1786. Littleberry Bush was born in 1788, dies in 1829. I honestly can’t picture an old man with such a cute name.

There is a lot of talk in the current political climate that civility has left politics. I suppose that works under an assumption that civility once played a part in politics.

North Carolina has a distinction that reminds you that the death of Alexander Hamilton was not so out of place. Twice in North Carolina history, a bitter race for Congress left the opponents so enraged at comments made during the course of the campaign that the two opponents later fought duels.

The first was fought in 1802 between John Stanly and Richard Dobbs Spaight. Spaight has signed the Declaration of Independence and been a Governor and a Congressman, but Stanly was outraged by comments made by Spaight during their 1800 race for Congress and their duel ended with Spaight’s death and the subsequent banning of dueling by the state of North Carolina.

A bizarre footnote to this duel is that some twenty years later, Spaight’s son, Richard Dobbs Spaight, Jr. ran against Stanly for the North Carolina House of Commons (and won).

The second duel came in 1827. Again comments during a Congressional campaign (this one in 1825) resulted in the winner of the race (this time Samuel P. Carson) challenging the loser (Robert B. Vance) to a duel. In both duels, the winner of the Congressional election was ousting an incumbent, in both duels the winner of the election made the challenge, and in both cases the winner survived the duel and the loser of the election also became the loser of the duel.

And people complain today about the lack of civility in politics?

Erik Beck

Eventhough the New York Times wouldn’t let us use their map technology, I still love their primaries map. http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/demmap/index.htmlIt’s great for finding out where we have been and where we are going in the 2008 Presidential election. For the map of the 1800 Presidential election you will have to check out the New reference book by Ken Martis. Hopefully your library has bought it already.  

It was a fine hard drive. It ran fast and hard. It was a warm hard drive and that may have been what did it in. But we may never know the cause of death. The hard drive was proclaimed dead at 3:15 yesterday March 31, 2008 at the apple store in Natick. At the Apple Store, the self-proclaimed,  Mac Genius” probably did not do everything that could be done. Krista strongly suspects that they were quick to pull the plug in order to harvest the hard drive to be resold as a used part. Krista stated, “They only spent 5 minutes trying to cure it! It seemed like they just wanted to make the job easier for them.”

 The hard drive will be replaced but it may never be the same despite being charged 50$ to backup data.  Krista thanks everyone for their support during this hard time and will except donations in the form of assistance in potentially reconfiguring programs lost.  Until a new replacement hard drive is installed, Krista can be found working off of other work stations.

One of the great pleasures of working on the A New Nation Votes project is the amount of interesting material in the pages that don’t have to do with the elections.

Here’s a great quote from the Delaware Governor’s Register from 1821:

“September 17 - Thomas Fisher Esquire Sheriff of Kent County deposited in the office of the Secretary of State the certificate of Nicholas Ridgely Esquire Chancellor, certifying that the said Thomas Fisher Esquire Sheriff as aforesaid had on the said 17 September 1821 - given security within the time and in the manner required by an Act of the General Assembly entitled “A Supplement to the Act entitled “An Act to requiring “Sheriffs to give security” passed at Dover January 1821 - with the recognizance taken for that purpose.”

I have not misquoted any of that. There is an Act that’s a Supplement for an Act entitled an Act. There are two open quotes that are left open.

Roughly translated into common sense, Fisher gave Ridgely a check.

Erik Beck

Salem Town was first elected a Massachusetts State Senator from Worcester County in 1796. He ran in 1795 but lost. He was a champion of the First Massachusetts Turnpike, according to the book, The Turnpikes of New England published in 1919 that I found, for free, in full, on Google Books. Hurrah for freely available information!

It seems that Boston’s most recent ‘Big Dig’ efforts to bury the expressway sits as only the most recent example of contractors ‘cutting corners’ in Massachusetts road building. One observer of the First Massachusetts Turnpike, “thought that the contractor received too much profit from that. He cautioned his friend to watch the contractors, as they would cheat, placing stumps and large stones in the fill instead of good road material.” (Turnpikes, page 65) Sound familiar. Advice that should have been heard 200 years later.

Anyway, our man, Salem Town, continued to champion Turnpikes and the Turnpike book gives a short bio on pages 87-88

• Of Salem Town we had already heard as an incorporator of the First Masschusetts [Turnpike]. He was a man of note, and at this time [1802] was serving in the senate for the second time after having declined an advancement to the council. He had been a quartermaster for the revolutionary army … and later was second major in the Massachusetts militia. He served seven years in the house and eight in the senate, being first elected to the latter body as a successor to Moses Gill, who was advanced to a Lieutenant Governor in 1794. In 1802 and 1803, he served as a member of the Governor’s Council. Besides his connection with the First Massachusetts and with the Norfolk and Bristol he later appeared either as an incorporator or on the committee for laying out, of several other turnpike corporations.
• http://books.google.com/books?id=tjsBAAAAYAAJ&printsec=titlepage#PPA87,M1

  In 1812 the state of New York chose their Presidential Electors by the Legislature. The procedure is not in question, but I have always been curious about for whom the Federalist slate of electors would have voted for if they had been elected. I have asked this question to many people without getting any definite answer. Below are the pertinent facts pertaining to the 1812 Presidential election in New York.

        On May 29, 1812, shortly after the death of Vice President George Clinton, who was from New York state, Ninety One Republican members of the New York Legislature assembled and passed a resolution to support DeWitt Clinton for President. This resolution was supported by 87 members and newspaper reports state that the vote was unanimous. This was the General Assembly that had been elected in the spring of 1811 and had a Republican majority, but in the May elections of 1812 the Federalist captured the lower house and some of the members who voted for this resolution were defeated.

        On November 9, 1812 the New York Legislature convened to vote for Presidential Electors.  Each house [Senate and Assembly] voted separately and there were three slates of electors nominated; a Republican slate of electors for DeWitt Clinton, a Republican slate for James Madison and a Federalist slate for who knows, and this is the mystery that I am trying to solve.

        In order to be chosen, any Electoral slate had to have a majority of votes in both houses. The vote in the Senate was Clinton 18, Madison 8 and Federalist 6 and in the Assembly it was Federalist  58, Clinton  28 and Madison 23. Since the Clinton ticket carried the Senate and the Federal ticket the Assembly, there was no election and the Legislature in a joint session proceeded again to vote for Presidential electors.

       The vote in this joint session was for Clinton 74, Federalist 46 and 23 blanks [Madison supporters]. While it appears that eighteen Federal members voted for the Clinton slate of electors on this joint ballot, forty-six did not and together with the blank votes, the Legislature only gave Clinton a majority of 5 votes. He could have easily been defeated.

        So my question is, for whom did this Federalist slate of Presidential Electors intend to vote, if by chance they had been elected?

        In a side note, it should be mentioned that in early October 1812, Federalist from several Virginia counties met and refused to support DeWitt Clinton as the Federalist candidate for President. Instead they nominated Rufus King of New York for President and William R. Davie of North Carolina for Vice-President. As news of this venture drifted northward, many Federalist commented on it and the feeling I sense is that had it been nominated earlier it might have been the official Federalist ticket in the 1812 election.

        In the Virginia Presidential election, this ticket carried the area of that state which now comprises West Virginia and seven counties in Virginia proper.

                        Thanks for any input and comments.

                                        Philip J. Lampi

I saw this painting by John Lewis Krimmel, a german immigrant, at the Worcester Art Museum.  It is on loan from the Winterhur until April 6th.  I think it captures the excitement of election day in Philadelphia. And I think for the first time in my voting experience, the atmosphere on Super Tuesday at my polling place approached this level of activity. - Krista