Tennessee was easily stirred.  That the General merited the highest honor within the gift of the people required no argument among his fellow citizens.  The first open steps were taken in January, 1822, when the Gazette and other Nashville papers sounded the clarion call.  The response was overwhelming; and when Jackson himself, in reply to a letter from Grundy, diplomatically declared that he would “neither seek nor shun” the presidency, his candidacy was regarded as an established fact.  On the 20th of July, the Legislature of the State placed him formally in nomination.  Meanwhile Lewis had gone to North Carolina to work up sentiment there, and by the close of the year assurances of support were coming in satisfactorily.  From being skeptical or at best indifferent, Jackson himself had come to share the enthusiasm of his assiduous friends.

The Jackson managers banked from the first upon two main assets:  one was the exceptional popularity of their candidate, especially in the South and West; the other was a political situation so muddled that at the coming election it might be made to yield almost any result.  For upwards of a generation the presidency and vice presidency had been at the disposal of a working alliance of Virginia and New York, buttressed by such support as was needed from other controllable States.  Virginia regularly got the presidency, New York (except at the time of the Clinton defection of 1812) the vice presidency.  After the second election of Monroe, in 1820, however, there were multiplying signs that this affiliation of interests had reached the end of its tether.  In the first place, the Virginia dynasty had run out; at all events Virginia had no candidate to offer and was preparing to turn its support to a Georgian of Virginian birth, William H. Crawford.  In the second place, party lines had totally disappeared, and the unifying and stabilizing influences of party names and affiliations could not be counted on to keep down the number of independent candidacies.  Already, indeed, by the end of 1822 there were a half-dozen avowed candidates, three of whom had seats at Monroe’s Cabinet table.  Each was the representative of a section or of a distinct interest, rather than of a party, and no one was likely to feel under any compulsion to withdraw from the race at a preliminary stage.

New England offered John Quincy Adams.  She did so with reluctance, for the old Federalist elements had never forgiven him for his desertion to the Republican camp in the days of the embargo, while the back country democracy had always looked upon him as an alien.  But he was the section’s only available man—­indeed, the only promising candidate from any Northern State.  His frigid manner was against him.  But he had had a long and honorable diplomatic career; he was winning new distinction as Secretary of State; and he could expect to profit both by the feeling that the North was entitled to the presidency and by the fact that he was the only candidate from a non-slave State.