PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1832.
General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren were the candidates, on one side;
Mr. Clay and Mr. John Sergeant, of Pennsylvania, on the other,
and the result of no election had ever been looked to with more
solicitude. It was a question of systems and of measures, and
tried in the persons of men who stood out boldly and unequivocally
in the representation of their respective sides. Renewal of the
national bank charter, continuance of the high protective policy,
distribution of the public land money, internal improvement by the
federal government, removal of the Indians, interference between
Georgia and the Cherokees, and the whole American system were
staked on the issue, represented on one side by Mr. Clay and Mr.
Sergeant, and opposed, on the other, by General Jackson and Mr.
Van Buren. The defeat of Mr. Clay, and the consequent condemnation
of his measures, was complete and overwhelming. He received but
forty-nine votes out of a totality of two hundred and eighty-eight!
And this result is not to be attributed, as done by Mons. de
Tocqueville, to military fame. General Jackson was now a tried
statesman, and great issues were made in his person, and discussed
in every form of speech and writing, and in every forum, State,
and federal--from the halls of Congress to township meetings--and
his success was not only triumphant but progressive. His vote was
a large increase upon the preceding one of 1828, as that itself
had been upon the previous one of 1824. The result was hailed with
general satisfaction, as settling questions of national disturbance,
and leaving a clear field, as it was hoped, for future temperate
and useful legislation. The vice-presidential election, also, had a
point and a lesson in it. Besides concurring with General Jackson
in his systems of policy, Mr. Van Buren had, in his own person,
questions which concerned himself, and which went to his character
as a fair and honorable man. He had been rejected by the Senate
as minister to the court of Great Britain, under circumstances
to give _éclat_ to the rejection, being then at his post; and on
accusations of prostituting official station to party intrigue and
elevation, and humbling his country before Great Britain to obtain
as a favor what was due as a right. He had also been accused of
breaking up friendship between General Jackson and Mr. Calhoun, for
the purpose of getting a rival out of the way--contriving for that
purpose the dissolution of the cabinet, the resuscitation of the
buried question of the punishment of General Jackson in Mr. Monroe's
cabinet, and a system of intrigues to destroy Mr. Calhoun--all
brought forward imposingly in senatorial and Congress debates, in
pamphlets and periodicals, and in every variety of speech and of
newspaper publication; and all with the avowed purpose of showing
him unworthy to be elected Vice-President. Yet, he was elected--and
triumphantly--receiving the same vote with General Jackson, except
that of Pennsylvania, which went to one of her own citizens, Mr.
William Wilkins, then senator in Congress, and afterwards Minister
to Russia, and Secretary of War. Another circumstance attended
this election, of ominous character, and deriving emphasis from
the state of the times. South Carolina refused to vote in it;
that is to say, voted with neither party, and threw away her vote
upon citizens who were not candidates, and who received no vote
but her own; namely, Governor John Floyd of Virginia, and Mr.
Henry Lee of Massachusetts: a dereliction not to be accounted for
upon any intelligible or consistent reason, seeing that the rival
candidates held the opposite sides of the system of which the State
complained, and that the success of one was to be its overthrow;
of the other, to be its confirmation. This circumstance, coupled
with the nullification attitude which the State had assumed, gave
significance to this separation from the other States in the
matter of the election: a separation too marked not to be noted,
and interpreted by current events too clearly to be misunderstood.
Another circumstance attended this election, of a nature not of
itself to command commemoration, but worthy to be remembered for the
lesson it reads to all political parties founded upon one idea, and
especially when that idea has nothing political in it; it was the
anti-masonic vote of the State of Vermont, for Mr. Wirt, late United
States Attorney-General, for President; and for Mr. Amos Ellmaker of
Pennsylvania, for Vice-President. The cause of that vote was this:
some years before, a citizen of New-York, one Mr. Morgan, a member
of the Freemason fraternity, had disappeared, under circumstances
which induced the belief that he had been secretly put to death, by
order of the society, for divulging their secret. A great popular
ferment grew out of this belief, spreading into neighboring States,
with an outcry against all masons, and all secret societies, and
a demand for their suppression. Politicians embarked on this
current; turned it into the field of elections, and made it potent
in governing many. After obtaining dominion over so many local and
State elections, "anti-masonry," as the new enthusiasm was called,
aspired to higher game, undertook to govern presidential candidates,
subjecting them to interrogatories upon the point of their masonic
faith; and eventually set up candidates of their own for these two
high offices. The trial was made in the persons of Messrs. Wirt
and Ellmaker, and resulted in giving them seven votes--the vote of
Vermont alone--and, in showing the weakness of the party, and its
consequent inutility as a political machine. The rest is soon told.
Anti-masonry soon ceased to have a distinctive existence; died out,
and, in its death, left a lesson to all political parties founded in
one idea--especially when that idea has nothing political in it.