[Illustration:  John Quincy Adams]

%330.  Adams elected by the House of Representatives.%—­The Constitution provides that no man is chosen President by the electors who does not receive a majority of their votes.  In 1824 Jackson received ninety-nine; Adams, eighty-four; Crawford, forty-one; and Clay, thirty-seven.  There was, therefore, no election, and it became the duty of the House of Representatives to make a choice.  But according to the Constitution only the three highest could come before the House.  This left out Clay, who was Speaker and who had great influence.  His friends would not vote for Jackson on any account, nor for Crawford, the caucus candidate.  Adams they liked, because he believed in internal improvements at government expense and a protective tariff.  Adams accordingly was elected President.  Calhoun had been elected Vice President by the electoral college.

[Illustration:  The United States July 4, 1826]

The election of John Quincy Adams was a matter of intense disappointment to the friends of Jackson.  In the heat of party passion and the bitterness of their disappointment they declared that it was the result of a bargain between Adams and Clay.  Clay, they said, was to induce his friends in the House of Representatives to vote for Adams, in return for which Adams was to make Clay Secretary of State.  No such bargain was ever made.  But when Adams did appoint Clay Secretary of State, Jackson and his followers were fully convinced of the contrary[1].

[Footnote 1:  Parton’s Life of Jackson, Chap. 10; Schurz’s Life of Clay, Vol.  I., pp. 203-258]

As a consequence, the legislature of Tennessee at once renominated Jackson for the presidency, and he became the people’s candidate and drew about him not only the men who voted for him in 1824, but those also who had voted for Crawford, who was paralyzed and no longer a candidate.  They called themselves “Jackson men,” or Democratic Republicans.

Adams, it was known, would be nominated to succeed himself, and about him gathered all who wanted a tariff for protection, roads and canals at national expense, and a distribution among the states of the money obtained from the sale of public lands.  These were the “Adams men,” or National Republicans.

%331.  Antimasons.%—­But there was a third party which arose in a very curious way and soon became powerful.  In 1826, at Batavia in New York, a freemason named William Morgan announced his intention to publish a book revealing the secrets of masonry; but about the time the book was to come out Morgan disappeared and was never seen again.  This led to the belief that the masons had killed him, and stirred up great excitement all over the twelve western counties of New York.  The “antimasons” said that a man who was a freemason considered his duty to his order superior to his duty to his country; and a determined effort was made to prevent the election of any freemason to office.