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Andrew Jackson wins in 1824

Thande

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This is one I've pondered for a bit, though I don't have the expertise to do it justice myself. What if Andrew Jackson had emerged triumphant in the US presidential election of 1824?

For the uninitiated, this election was essentially the end of the 'Era of Good Feelings' in which the US had become virtually a single-party state under the Jeffersonian party then called the Republicans, and historiographically usually called the Democratic-Republicans. Only a handful of Federalists eked out an existence on lower levels of government in New England, discredited by the War of 1812 and other trends. Rather than the de facto unopposed coronation of James Madison in 1820, however, the unwieldy broad-tent Republican party was now becoming divided, and four different candidates - John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay - split the vote between them. As a result, there was no electoral college majority and Congress was called upon, for the first and last time, to elect the president in a contingent election.

The result was controversial. Jackson had led in the popular vote (though I'm not sure if that was known at the time) and the electoral college plurality, yet the House elected John Q. Adams. This is reflective of the divide between Adams' (a scion of the Federalists) more establishmentarian support versus Jackson's populism. In addition, there were accusations of a 'corrupt bargain', in which Clay had swung his supporters to Adams in return for the office of Secretary of State. Ultimately, of course, this led to the angry Jacksonians founding the Democratic Party and the Adams and Clay supporters the National Republicans (again more of a historiographic label) and then the Whigs.

But what if Jackson had won in the electoral college and there had been no contingent election? Would the Republican Party have held together for longer, at least on paper? What would Jackson have been like as president in 1824, when he was only reluctantly persuaded to run, as opposed to the fierily righteous, mud-slinging persona he brought to the bitter 1828 campaign in which he successfully unseated Adams? Would Jackson have had difficulty getting legislation through Congress, and would this have led to a different party split?

Of course, a question is how you get to this scenario. I want to focus on New York's 36 electoral votes, which would be enough to swing the election alone if they had gone to Jackson. In OTL New York was still using the method of legislative selection, which favoured Adams, though a few electors from the other three candidates were also selected. One possibility is if New York had switched to the popular vote method in 1824, but I'm not sure if there was any real enthusiasm for this at the time, and regardless it would probably have been split by district rather than winner-take-all.

Perhaps a more likely possibility involves our old friend and David Cameron lookalike, DeWitt Clinton. Clinton, who belonged to the more former Federalist tendency, had presidential ambitions of his own and had inherited his uncle George Clinton's supporters. In 1824, he reportedly supported Jackson more on a personal level, but believed he had a better chance of becoming president later if he aided Adams now. Adams regarded the support of Clinton's faction as crucial, but had a tendency to underestimate its personal loyalty to Clinton specifically and failed to keep it on-side - being caught offguard when Clinton died in early 1828 and his former faction's support did not automatically translate to Adams. In part due to this, the 'Albany Regency' pro-Jacksonian faction led by Martin Van Buren led to a Jacksonian majority in NY, and of course Van Buren would be Jackson's VP in 1828.

So perhaps something could have happened prior to the 1824 election which leads Clinton to decide that he cannot trust Adams to keep up his end of the deal, and instead to back Jackson then and deliver a sufficiently big chunk of New York's legislature-selected electors?

Thoughts?
 
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