Jackson never wearied of saying that he was “no politician.”  He was, none the less, one of the most forceful and successful politicians that the country has known.  He was fortunate in being able to personify a cause which was grounded deeply in the feelings and opinions of the people, and also in being able to command the services of a large group of tireless and skillful national and local managers.  He was willing to leave to these managers the infinite details of his campaign.  But he kept in close touch with them and their subordinates, and upon occasion he did not hesitate to take personal command.  In politics, as in war, he was imperious; persons not willing to support him with all their might, and without question or quibble, he preferred to see on the other side.  Throughout the campaign his opponents hoped, and his friends feared, that he would commit some deed of anger that would ruin his chances of election.  The temptation was strong, especially when the circumstances of his marriage were dragged into the controversy.  But while he chafed inwardly, and sometimes expressed himself with more force than elegance in the presence of his friends, he maintained an outward calm and dignity.  His bitterest feeling was reserved for Clay, who was known to be the chief inspirer of the National Republicans’ mud-slinging campaign.  But he felt that Adams had it in his power to put a stop to the slanders that were set in circulation, had he cared to do so.

As the campaign drew to a close, circumstances pointed with increasing sureness to the triumph of the Jackson forces.  Adams, foreseeing the end, found solace in harsh and sometimes picturesque entries in his diary.  A group of opposition Congressmen he pronounced “skunks of party slander.”  Calhoun he described as “stimulated to frenzy by success, flattery, and premature advancement; governed by no steady principle, but sagacious to seize upon every prevailing popular breeze to swell his own sails.”  Clay, likewise, became petulant and gloomy.  In the last two months of the canvass Jackson ordered a general onslaught upon Kentucky, and when finally it was affirmed that the State had been “carried out from under” its accustomed master, Clay knew only too well that the boast was true.  To Adams’s assurances that after four years of Jackson the country would gladly turn to the Kentuckian, the latter could only reply that there would, indeed, be a reaction, but that before another President would be taken from the West he would be too old; and it was with difficulty that Adams persuaded him not to retire immediately from the Cabinet.

The results of the contest fully bore out the apprehensions of the Administration.  Jackson received nearly 140,000 more popular votes than Adams and carried every State south of the Potomac and west of the Alleghanies.  He carried Pennsylvania also by a vote of two to one and divided about equally with his opponent the votes of New York and Maryland.  Only New England held fast for Adams.  As one writer has facetiously remarked, “It took a New England conscience to hold a follower in line for the New England candidate.”  The total electoral vote was 178 for Jackson and 83 for Adams.  Calhoun was easily reelected to the vice presidency.  Both branches of Congress remained under the control of Jackson’s partizans.