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A Historical Perspective on Presidential Campaigns

By Dr. Ken Stevens

Think the mudslinging of the 2000 political campaign has sunk politics to a new low? Actually, as the dean of presidential historians-and TCU emeritus professor-Paul F. Boller, has demonstrated in his best-selling book Presidential Campaigns, things aren't as bad as they used to be. In the Jacksonian Era-the period between the election of Andrew Jackson and the election of Abraham Lincoln-scurrilous and vindictive politics was an art form.

Undoubtedly the most sordid presidential contest in American history involved Jackson and John Quincy Adams-the son of a former president-in 1828. Bad feeling between the candidates went back to the 1824 election, which Adams had won under suspicious circumstances. Since no candidate had received a majority in the electoral college, the choice devolved on the House of Representatives. There, the Jacksonians charged, Speaker of the House Henry Clay had made a "corrupt bargain" to support the New Englander in exchange for the office of secretary of state. That very year the Jacksonians began organizing for the election of 1828.

For sheer meanness the 1828 campaign has never been matched. Democrats not only recalled the "corrupt bargain" of the previous election but denounced Adams for owning a billiard table and an ivory chess set. They also accused him of traveling on Sunday, having premarital sexual relations with his wife, and claimed that when minister to Russia, he had arranged for an American girl to satisfy the lust of Czar Alexander I. In plain terms, they accused Adams of being a pimp.

Adams's supporters launched their own assaults against Jackson and many of the charges had some basis in fact. Jackson, they said, was a mere hot-tempered "military chieftain" who had executed-without justification, according to the critics-six soldiers under his command for desertion and launched an unauthorized invasion of Spanish Florida. He was, they accurately complained, a slaver, a gambler, a brawler, and a duelist. Indeed, Jackson's Tennessee plantation was worked by slaves, he bet on horses and cockfights, he had been shot and stabbed during a barroom fight, and he had killed a man in a duel (though he carried for the rest of his life a pistol ball in the chest from his opponent).

Jackson cared little what his enemies thought of him, but he was devastated when Adams supporters attacked his late mother as "a common prostitute brought to this country by British soldiers."

He was even more outraged when assaults were made on his wife Rachel. Andrew and Rachel had married in 1791, after she and her first husband, Lewis Robards, were divorced. At least, Andrew and Rachel thought she was divorced. It turned out that the legal proceedings had never been completed. When Robards reappeared some time later, he was granted a divorce on the grounds that Rachel was living in adultery with Jackson. The couple quickly went through another wedding ceremony, but the embarrassment of the episode changed their lives forever. During the campaign of 1828, the adultery charges were revived to Andrew and Rachel's mortification. "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?" one newspaper asked. When his beloved Rachel died of a heart attack shortly after the election, an embittered Jackson was certain that the cruel political campaign had killed her. As she was laid to rest, Jackson exclaimed, "May God Almighty forgive her murderers as I know she forgave them. I never can."

The campaign of 1840 is remembered as the election in which the Whigs portrayed their candidate, William Henry Harrison, as a humble farmer who lived in a log cabin and consumed hard cider as his favorite beverage while incumbent president Martin Van Buren was portrayed as an effete dandy who lived in luxury and sipped champagne from silver and gold goblets. It seemed to matter little that Harrison was the scion of one of the oldest and wealthiest landed families of Virginia or that Van Buren was the son of a New York tavern keeper.

Rarely has a president ever been subjected to the kind of ridicule that Van Buren endured. In a speech delivered in the House of Representatives in April 1840, Congressman Charles Ogle carried out one of the great demagogic assaults in the history of American politics. Ogle attacked what he called the "Regal Splendor of the President's Palace," a dwelling, which he claimed, was "as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion." Leading his listeners through a mock tour of the White House, Ogle pointed out the fine English carpets, French furniture, silk upholstery, and an assortment of gold and silver tableware. In one room, he said, there were four large mirrors costing $2,400 each, before which Van Buren was said to strut like a peacock.

Ogle had more. The president had squandered $1,305.50 of public money on fancy curtains, an amount he noted that could purchase three or four completely furnished log cabins and leave a few dollars left over to treat folks to as much hard cider as they could drink. Perhaps the most wondrous sight in the palace was the great state dining room where, Ogle said, visitors were served not "those old unfashionable dishes 'hog and hominy,' 'fried meat and gravy,' 'schnitz, knep, and sourcrout,' with a mug of 'hard cider.' No, sir, no." Van Buren looked upon those dishes with disdain. Democrats protested Ogles' calumnies in vain and tried to show that Harrison was the real aristocrat in the campaign. But the damage was done.

Harrison, at sixty-seven, became the oldest man ever elected president (a distinction he retained until the election of Ronald Reagan), but he is most remembered as the first president to die in office, succumbing to pneumonia only thirty days after his inauguration.

A glance at other presidential contests of the period confirms the thesis. In the election of 1844, Democrats who supported James K. Polk alleged that Whig Henry Clay had broken every one of the Ten Commandments. Rather than enumerate his transgressions, they stated that the "history of Mr. Clay's debaucheries…is too shocking, too disgusting to appear in public print." Another source, however, confirmed that Clay spent "his days at the gaming table and his nights in a brothel."

Americans admire their military heroes and sometimes make them presidents, but distinguished service in wartime did not inoculate them from fierce criticism in the Age of Jackson. General Zachary Taylor-who led U.S. forces during the War with Mexico-complained that attacks on his military record and character during the campaign of 1848 were some of the "vilest slanders of the most unprincipled demagogues this or any other nation was ever cursed with." In 1852, opponents of New Hampshire's Franklin Pierce dubbed the New Hampshire politician, who had collapsed from heat prostration during a battle in the Mexican War, as "the Fainting General."

Nor was discussion of a candidate's religion beyond bounds. The American Party-which had much support in the Jacksonian Era-vehemently expressed its hostility to the Irish Catholics that they felt were flooding the country. They charged that Republican candidate John C. Fremont was a Catholic, a charge that Fremont refused to publicly deny because, he said, it was not a legitimate issue.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 marked the close of the Jacksonian political system. Weighty issues were indeed debated, but there were also the usual irrelevant detractions, including Lincoln's appearance. One Southern observer described him as a "horrid looking wretch…of the uncomeliest visage, and of the dirtiest complexion." He was, said the Houston Telegraph, the "most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame."

Is there anything to be learned from this catalog of villainies? The moral of the story, I would submit, is not that since politics was nasty then, it's okay for it to be equally loathsome now. Instead, what candidates and their supporters might want to keep in mind is that history remembers such outrages and is not kind to the memories of those who perpetuate them.