Author: Walter B. EdgarPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Presidents
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
Adams, Calhoun, the Election of 1824, and Their Relationship
Author: Walter B. EdgarPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Presidents
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
Heirs of the Founders
Author: H. W. BrandsPublisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385542542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart. Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.
Adams and Calhoun
Author: William F. HartfordPublisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643363956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
Examines the evolving lives of two men who were crucial political figures in the consequential decades prior to the Civil War Although neither of them lived to see the Civil War, John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun did as much any two political figures of the era to shape the intersectional tensions that produced the conflict. William F. Hartford examines the lives of Adams and Calhoun as a prism through which to view the developing sectional conflict. While both men came of age as strong nationalists, their views, like those of the nation, diverged by the 1830s, largely over the issue of slavery. Hartford examines the two men's responses to issues of nationalism and empire, sectionalism and nullification, slavery and antislavery, party and politics, and also the expansion of slavery. He offers fresh insights into the sectional conflict that also accounts for the role of personal idiosyncrasy and interpersonal relationships in the coming of the Civil War.
The One-Party Presidential Contest
Author: Donald RatcliffePublisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700632476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
The election of 1824 is commonly viewed as a mildly interesting contest involving several colorful personalities—John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and William H. Crawford—that established Old Hickory as the people's choice and yet, through "bargain and corruption," deprived him of the presidency. In The One-Party Presidential Contest, Donald Ratcliffe reveals that Jackson was not the most popular candidate and the corrupt bargaining was a myth. The election saw the final disruption of both the dominant Democratic Republican Party and the dying Federalist Party, and the creation of new political formations that would slowly evolve into the Democratic and National Republicans (later Whig) Parties—thus bringing about arguably the greatest voter realignment in US history. Bringing to bear over 35 years of research, Ratcliffe describes how loyal Democratic Republicans tried to control the election but failed, as five of their party colleagues persisted in competing, in novel ways, until the contest had to be decided in the House of Representatives. Initially a struggle between personalities, the election evolved into a fight to control future policy, with large consequences for future presidential politics. The One-Party Presidential Contest offers a nuanced account of the proceedings, one that balances the undisciplined conflict of personal ambitions with the issues, principles, and prejudices that swirled around the election. In this book we clearly see, perhaps for the first time, how the election of 1824 revealed fracture lines within the young republic—and created others that would forever change the course of American politics.
The Presidential Election of 1824-1825
Author: Everett Somerville BrownPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Presidents
Languages : en
Pages : 32
Book Description
John C Calhoun
Author: Irving H. BartlettPublisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393332865
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
John C. Calhoun was a rare figure in American history: a lifelong politician who was also a profound political philosopher. Vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, he was a dominant presence in the U.S. Senate. Now comes a major new biography from the author of Daniel Webster.
The Birth of Modern Politics
Author: Lynn Hudson ParsonsPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199718504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political résumé were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life. It was, many historians have argued, the country's first truly democratic presidential election. It was also the election that opened a Pandora's box of campaign tactics, including coordinated media, get-out-the-vote efforts, fund-raising, organized rallies, opinion polling, campaign paraphernalia, ethnic voting blocs, "opposition research," and smear tactics. In The Birth of Modern Politics, Parsons shows that the Adams-Jackson contest also began a national debate that is eerily contemporary, pitting those whose cultural, social, and economic values were rooted in community action for the common good against those who believed the common good was best served by giving individuals as much freedom as possible to promote their own interests. The book offers fresh and illuminating portraits of both Adams and Jackson and reveals how, despite their vastly different backgrounds, they had started out with many of the same values, admired one another, and had often been allies in common causes. But by 1828, caught up in a shifting political landscape, they were plunged into a competition that separated them decisively from the Founding Fathers' era and ushered in a style of politics that is still with us today.
John Quincy Adams: Diaries Vol. 2 1821-1848 (LOA #294)
Author: John Quincy AdamsPublisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598535242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 989
Book Description
A landmark new selected edition of an American masterpiece: the incomparable self-portrait of a man and his times from the Revolution to the coming of the Civil War The diary of John Quincy Adams is one of the most extraordinary works in American literature. Begun in 1779 at the age of twelve and kept more or less faithfully until his death almost 70 years later, and totaling some fifteen thousand closely-written manuscript pages, it is both an unrivaled record of historical events and personalities from the nation's founding to the antebellum era and a masterpiece of American self-portraiture, tracing the spiritual, literary, and scientific interests of an exceptionally lively mind. Now, for the 250th anniversary of Adams's birth, Library of America and historian David Waldstreicher present a two-volume reader's edition of diary selections based for the first time on the original manuscripts, restoring personal and revealing passages suppressed in earlier editions. Volume 2 opens with Adams serving as Secretary of State, amid political maneuverings within and outside James Monroe's cabinet to become his successor, a process that culminates in Adams's election to the presidency by the House of Representatives after the deadlocked four-way contest of 1824. Even as Adams takes the oath of office, rivals Henry Clay, his Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, his vice president, and an embittered Andrew Jackson, eye the election of 1828. The diary records in candid detail his frustration as his far-sighted agenda for national improvement founders on the rocks of internecine political factionalism, conflict that results in his becoming only the second president, with his father, to fail to secure reelection. After a short-lived retirement, Adams returns to public service as a Congressman from Massachusetts, and for the last seventeen years of his life he leads efforts to resist the extension of slavery and to end the notorious "gag rule" that stifles debate on the issue in Congress. In 1841 he further burnishes his reputation as a scourge of the Slave Power by successfully defending African mutineers of the slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court. The diary achieves perhaps its greatest force in its prescient anticipation of the Civil War and Emancipation, an “object,” as Adams described it during the Missouri Crisis, “vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue.”
The Presidency of John Quincy Adams
Author: Mary W. M. HargreavesPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Book Description
Historians have not been generous in judging the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Those who have most conspicuously upheld Adams's fame have, at the same time, virtually ignored his service in the White House. Critics, on the other hand, have described his administration as a failure, founded upon "bargain and corruption" and marked by exclusion of the United States from the British West Indian trade, the ineffectiveness of its efforts to promote strong Pan-American relationships, and the enactment of the "tariff of abominations." Some analysts have even argued that it generated the sectionalism which terminated the "Era of Good Feelings." Mary Hargreaves contends, instead, that the basic effort of Adams's presidency was to harmonize divergent sectional interests. To ignore the Adams administration's commitment to nationalism, she argues, is to overlook a fundamental stage in the establishment of the federal government as guardian of the general interest. The volume contains new information on the development of United States commercial policy, the nation's early relationships with Latin America, and difficulties of local and regional adjustment to the growth of the national economy. It will be of keen interest to all students of the economic and political history of the early national period.
The One-party Presidential Contest
Author: Donald John RatcliffePublisher:
ISBN: 9780700621309
Category : Presidents
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The 1824 Presidential election was a struggle between personalities; all five were from the same party, the Democratic Republicans. The result was a contest decided in the House of Representatives.