CHAPTER VII.

HISTORY UNDER PRESIDENT

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, 1825-1829.

ITH the inauguration of Mr. Adams "the era of

WITH

good feeling" and the apparent unification of parties rapidly disappeared, and almost from the beginning the struggle for the succession began. Andrew Jackson was formally nominated by the Legislature of Tennessee as early as October, 1825, and promptly accepted the nomination. The Republican camp thus became divided into two opposing armies, called at first "the Adams men" and "the Jackson men." With the former were now included the followers of Clay, with the latter were consolidated the recent supporters of Crawford. Adams, both in his inaugural address and in his first message to Congress, took strong grounds in favor. of a system of national internal improvements, arguing in opposition to the position of Mr. Monroe, in his veto of the Cumberland Road Bill, in favor of the constitutional right of Congress to undertake such a system. This, together with other broad views avowed by the President or implied in his recommendations, soon developed the old line of division between the followers of Jefferson and those of Hamilton, the latter going to the support of the administration, the

former rallying against it. Both still called themselves Republicans, but the loose constructionists gradually assumed the name of National Republicans, and the followers of Jefferson from Democratic Republicans were in time known as the Democratic party. The first Congressional election returned an anti-administration majority, and from that time to the end of his term Adams was confronted by a Congress unfriendly in both branches. This put an end to the general scheme for national internal improvements.

Much debate was had on a proposition suggested by the late election to change the manner of choosing the President, and, as in nearly all the other discussions of the administration, it partook of a strongly political character. The administration of Mr. Adams became more unpopular as time went on. Many charges were brought against it, which were fully believed at the time, as to its aristocratic or anti-popular tendency, and the President was not a man to build up a strong personal following or even a great political party.

The tariff of 1828 was the chief event of Adams' administration and as the beginning and cause of great sectional troubles in the country deserves especial mention. It seems to have been a part of the political campaigning of the times to preface a Presidential election with a new tariff law. We have already referred to the tariff bill of 1816. A general tariff bill failed in 1820 by the casting vote of the President of the Senate.

In 1824 a bill was

passed by narrow majorities, after a long struggle, and now, in 1828, new legislation was demanded in the direc

tion of higher rates. In the period between the first tariff and that of 1816 no less than seventeen acts had passed, generally in the same direction. By that time the rate of duty had gone up from 81⁄2 to about 30 per cent. on dutiable goods. In 1824 the increase had reached 37 per cent., and in that tariff a duty was, for the first time, placed on wool. As England soon after reduced her duties on wool, giving to her manufacturers cheaper raw material, our woollen manufacturers raised the first cry of distress against her competition, and those of Boston sent a petition to Congress, in 1826, asking more protection. A bill introduced in accordance with their wishes was tabled in the Senate by the casting vote of the VicePresident.

The following year a convention met at Harrisburg which widened the combination so as to include iron, steel, hemp, glass, wool and woollens, for all of which it demanded more protection. The new tariff bill introduced in 1828 was based on the recommendations of this convention. It was built up around wool and woollens and it was constructed, as had been its immediate forerunners, on the principle of conceding protection to a sufficient number of local interests to secure the votes necessary to its passage.

Many members avowed their support to rest upon this ground. It thus became, not only an incongruous, but a sectional bill, and called forth the bitter opposition of the Southern members, who regarded it as outrageously oppressive upon their constituents. Calhoun had strongly advocated the protective tafiff of 1816. He began now to

look to the Kentucky and Virginia resolution of 1798 for a defence for his State and section against the tariff of 1828. Mr. Webster, whose speech against the protective policy in 1824 undoubtedly expressed the permanent convictions of his mind as to that system, now changed his attitude with the supposed change in the interests of his constituents under the tariff.

The tariff of 1828 cannot be called a party measure, as many Jackson men voted for it, but it was, after all, a bid of the Adams administration for a re-election, although it became, in passing through Congress, a very different measure from what they intended it to be as first presented. The average rate of dutiable goods was now 41 per cent., and the tariff by which this result was reached was, in its details, so clearly the work of intrigue and selfish scrambles that it has passed into history as the Tariff of Abominations.

The progress of Democratic ideas had been marked in recent years by the abolition of restrictions and qualifications of the right of suffrage and by a transfer, in nearly all of the States, of the right of choosing electors for President from the Legislatures to the people. Of the twenty-four States participating in the election of 1828 only South Carolina and Delaware chose electors by their Legislatures. In New York, Maine, Maryland and Tennessee the choice was by districts; in the other Stateseighteen in number-by general ticket. On the popular vote Jackson received 647,276 votes, Adams 508,064 votes. In the electoral college Jackson had 118, Adams 83. For

Vice-President Calhoun received 171, Richard Rush 83, Smith, of South Carolina, 7.

"The election of General Jackson," says Mr. Benton, was a triumph of Democratic principle and an assertion of the people's right to govern themselves. That principle had been violated in the Presidential election in the House of Representatives in the session of 1824 and 1825, and the sanction or rebuke of that violation was a leading question in the whole canvass. It was also a triumph over the protective policy, the federal internal improvement policy, the latitudinous construction of the Constitution, and of the Democracy over the Federalists, then called National Republicans, and was the re-establishment of parties on principle, according to the landmarks of the early ages of the government."