Presidential elections were held in the United States from October 31 to December 2, 1828. Just as in the 1824 election, President John Quincy Adams of the National Republican Party faced Andrew Jackson of the Democratic Party, making the election the second rematch in presidential history. Both parties were new organizations, and this was the first presidential election their nominees contested.
With the collapse of the Federalist Party, four members of the Democratic-Republican Party, including Jackson and Adams, had sought the presidency in the 1824 election. Jackson had won a plurality (but not majority) of both the electoral vote and popular vote in the 1824 election, but had lost the contingent election that was held in the House of Representatives. In the aftermath of the election, Jackson's supporters accused Adams and Henry Clay of having reached a "corrupt bargain" in which Clay helped Adams win the contingent election in return for the position of Secretary of State. After the 1824 election, Jackson's supporters immediately began plans for a campaign in 1828, and the Democratic-Republican Party fractured into the National Republican Party and the Democratic Party during Adams's presidency.
The 1828 campaign was marked by large amounts of "mudslinging", as both parties attacked the personal qualities of the opposing party's candidate. Jackson dominated in the South and the West, aided in part by the passage of the Tariff of 1828. With the ongoing expansion of the right to vote to most white men, the election marked a dramatic expansion of the electorate, with 9.5% of Americans casting a vote for president, compared with 3.4% in 1824. Several states transitioned to a popular vote for president, leaving South Carolina and Delaware as the only states in which the legislature chose presidential electors.
Jackson decisively won the election, carrying 55.5% of the popular vote and 178 electoral votes, to Adams' 83. The election marked the rise of Jacksonian Democracy and the transition from the First Party System to the Second Party System. Historians debate the significance of the election, with many arguing that it marked the beginning of modern American politics by removing key barriers to voter participation and establishing a stable two-party system. Jackson became the first president whose home state was neither Massachusetts nor Virginia, while Adams was the second to lose re-election, following his father John Adams.
Background
The victorious general of the Battle of New Orleans had spent most of the 1810s making war, first on the Creek Indians in present-day Alabama; the Creeks fared poorly and were forced to cede millions of acres of land to Jackson, acting as agent for the federal government. Later, Jackson would use similar tactics in Spanish Florida, escalating the situation, invading Spanish territory, ultimately leading to the cessation of Florida. Riding a wave of patriotism, the backers of Jackson wished to see the expansion of more lands in the Cotton Belt. Jackson, having earlier served in Congress, was familiar with the national capital; however, to stand for election to the presidency was a novel idea to the old Federalists, the aristocratic members of the Virginia dynasty, and the rich who assumed the presidency of the fledgling republic would always pass hands between aristrocrats, not an orphaned son of the revolution.
The 1824 contest pitting Jackson directly against John Quincy Adams—the very embodiment of the New England establishment—and the resulting deadlock in the Electoral College threw the decision to the House of Representatives. There, Henry Clay, threw his critical support to Adams. To Jackson and his fiercely loyal Western partisans, this was nothing short of a "Corrupt Bargain," a backroom betrayal of the popular will by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Washington. Enraged and vindicated, Jackson resigned his Senate seat and retreated to his Tennessee estate, the Hermitage, not to retire, but to marshal a political machine the likes of which the young republic had never seen. Over the next four years, his backers systematically dismantled the old caucus system, building local committees, organizing mass rallies, and establishing partisan newspapers that preached a new gospel of majoritarian democracy. They painted Adams as an effete, free-spending monarchist who stuffed the federal bureaucracy with his cronies, while presenting Jackson as the uncorrupted champion of the common planter, the frontier farmer, and the urban mechanic. In a prelude to the presidential election, the Jacksonians bolstered their numbers in Congress in the 1826 congressional elections, with Jackson ally Andrew Stevenson chosen as the new Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1827 over Adams ally Speaker, John W. Taylor.
Nominations
Jacksonian Party
In October 1825, the Tennessee legislature re-nominated Jackson for president. Congressional opponents of Adams, including former William H. Crawford supporter Martin Van Buren, rallied around Jackson's candidacy. Jackson's supporters called themselves Democrats, and would formally organize as the Democratic Party shortly after his election. In hopes of uniting those opposed to Adams, Jackson ran on a ticket with Calhoun. No congressional nominating caucus or national convention was held.
Adams' relationship with Vice President John C. Calhoun deteriorated, with Calhoun opposing Clay's appointment as Secretary of State due to his own presidential ambitions. In June 1826, Calhoun gave his support to Jackson for the 1828 election. Calhoun's stance on the removal of Native Americans was not accepted by the Georgian electors who instead voted for William Smith.
Van Buren, who supported Crawford during the 1824 election, supported Jackson during the 1828 election and aided in the selection of Calhoun as vice president in order to prevent DeWitt Clinton, his political enemy, from being selected. Clinton died on February 11, 1828. Van Buren arranged for incidents to divide Calhoun and Adams such as him abstaining from a vote on tariff legislation supported by Adams in order for Calhoun to break the tie by voting against it.
Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Examiner, was one of the leading supporters of Crawford during the 1824 election and Van Buren convinced him to support Jackson. Van Buren convinced him of an alliance "between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North".
National Republican Party
President Adams and his allies, including Secretary of State Clay and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, became known as the National Republicans or "Adams Party." The National Republicans were significantly less organized than the Democrats, and many party leaders did not embrace the new era of popular campaigning. Adams was re-nominated on the endorsement of state legislatures and partisan rallies. As with the Democrats, no nominating caucus or national convention was held. Adams chose Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush, a Pennsylvanian known for his protectionist views, as his running mate. Adams, who was personally popular in New England, hoped to assemble a coalition in which Clay attracted Western voters, Rush attracted voters in the middle states, and Webster won over former members of the Federalist Party.
Anti-Masonic Party
The Anti-Masonic Party was organized in Upstate New York in 1827, in response to the disappearance of William Morgan. Senior figures in the Adams Party were sympathetic to Anti-Masonry, including Thurlow Weed, Adams's unofficial New York campaign manager. The New York Anti-Masonic Party "took little part in the presidential election," but many individual Anti-Masons supported Adams.
General election
One memoir of 19th-century life in Illinois gives a sense of importance of the 1828 in American life:
It was probably the most exciting election, and probably more bitter feeling indulged in, than at any election that has ever taken place in this country. For several months before the election almost every occupation was dropped and the men occupied their time electioneering. Almost every day long lines of men could be seen marching after the fife and drum and led by some officer that had served in the war of 1812. The Jackson party would erect their hickory poles and the Adams party their tall maple poles, and stands would be erected under their respective poles, and the best speakers in the country would be brought out, and each party would have a barbecue of a roast ox or half-a-dozen sheep about every week.
Campaign
The campaign was marked by large amounts of nasty "mudslinging." Jackson's marriage, for example, came in for the vicious attack. Charles Hammond, in his Cincinnati Gazette, asked: "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" At the time of the election, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson had been happily, legally married for almost 35 years, but when they met, Rachel had been legally married to Lewis Robards. In the Adams campaign managers' hands, this became a scandal. The Robards–Donelson–Jackson relationship controversy has been ongoing for the better part of 200 years, but since the 1970s, historians generally agree that Andrew and Rachel ran off together to force a divorce from Lewis Robards that would have otherwise been inaccessible to Rachel and that they were a couple for roughly five years before they were legally married in 1794. Decades later, their youthful love story became a political liability. Jackson's campaign did major spin control and manufactured a false timeline, convinced friends in Natchez to vouch for the retcon, and offered a semi-plausible "they were confused about divorce law" excuse to paper over the irregular marriage.Jackson biographers and Democratic partisans carried the false narrative forward well into the late 20th century.
Jackson was also charged with being an "adulterer, a gambler, a cockfighter, a bigamist, a Negro trader, drunkard, a murderer, a thief and a liar." He was a gambler, a lifelong cocker, and a slave trader. His marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards took place before her divorce from her first husband had been finalized, making the marriage bigamous. Jackson believed that attacks on him were personal vendettas consequent to past disputes, writing, "I am branded with every crime, and Doctor McNary, Col. Erwin, Anderson and Williams are associated for this purpose." One thing that all these men had in common is that they had all known and/or been business partners and/or been military comrades of Jackson going back decades. McNairy's brother gave Jackson his first law job in Nashville in 1789, Erwin and Jackson had been long-time land speculation partners until a massive deal went bad, Anderson had been Jackson's aide-de-camp at the time of the Burr conspiracy and had succeeded him as district attorney for Tennessee, and Williams had sold slaves to Jackson and had been honored by the general for his gallant leadership as a militia commander during the 1813–14 campaign against the Red Stick Creeks.
Jackson's campaigners fired back by claiming that while serving as minister to Russia, Adams had procured a young girl to serve as a prostitute for Emperor Alexander I. They also stated that Adams had a billiard table in the White House and that he had charged the government for it. (In fact Adams while minister to Russia had employed a young girl as a maid to his wife; the girl had written a letter which had been intercepted by the Russian postal services. Alexander I had been curious to meet the letter writer publicly at court and Adams had done so. The billiard table was Adams' personal property; a bill for repairing it had been accidentally included in the White House expense accounts. Adams also came under attack for having a chess set). In the words of Mark R. Cheathem, historian and editor of the presidential papers of Martin Van Buren, "Jackson's campaign accused the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, of being a pimp and spending the people's money to fund gambling in the White House. Adams was many things—stiff, dour, pious, the son of a president, an accomplished diplomat—but a betting whoremonger he was not."
Jackson also came under heavy attack as a slave trader who bought and sold slaves and moved them about in defiance of modern standards of morality (he was not attacked for merely owning slaves used in plantation work). The Coffin Handbills attacked Jackson for his courts-martial, execution of deserters, and massacres of Indian villages, and also his habit of dueling and that he supposedly fought over 100 duels. In fact, Jackson had only fought three duels: in the first both men had fired at each other but made up; in the second duel, Jackson vs John Sevier, it had taken place but only two persons not connected with either party had been slightly injured. The third duel was with Charles Dickinson in which Dickinson was mortally wounded while Jackson was left with a bullet in his chest. A so-called fourth duel between Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton was in fact a frontier brawl which left Jackson badly wounded in the shoulder. That said the list of violent incidents involving Andrew Jackson began with his arrival in Tennessee in the 1780s and continued apace for years. As historian J. M. Opal put it, "[Jackson's] willingness to kill, assault, or threaten people was a constant theme in his adult life and a central component of the reputation he cultivated."
Ezra Stiles Ely attacked Adams' Unitarian beliefs and called for Christians to vote for Jackson.