"The corruption involved in the presidential election of 1825 was not whether Adams and Clay met in secret and made a deal. (Historians have been arguing over that pointless topic for generations.) The corruption was the decision to hand the presidency to Adams in open defiance of the popular will. Individual interest was placed ahead of the public good. As far as can be determined more Americans wanted Andrew Jackson as their President than anyone else. That fact was contemptuously dismissed..." Robert Remini,
Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832 https://books.google.com/books?id=kbM-AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98Was Remini right about this? Well, in the first place the notion that the House was bound to vote for the candidate with the plurality of popular (or for that matter electoral) votes finds no support in the Constitution. (Indeed, what would be the point of even having a contingent election by the House if there were such an obligation?) But let us say that there is such an obligation, morally if not legally. Is Remini right that "As far as can be determined more Americans wanted Andrew Jackson as their President than anyone else"? According to Donald Ratcliffe in his
The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson and 1824's Five-Horse Race (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas 2015), the answer, surprisingly, is No!
But don't all the standard tables show Jackson as winning a plurality of the popular as well as electoral vote (not to mention the greatest number of states carried)? E.g.,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1824 They do, but they do not answer the important question,
What was the popular sentiment in the states which still chose electors by legislature? When those states are counted, Ratcliffe argues, Adams was at least as popular as Jackson in 1824:
"Moreover, the argument that congressmen were obliged to vote for the man who won most votes in the Electoral College began to seem silly: otherwise, why did the Constitution insist on an absolute majority and refer a hung election to the House? It was not as though a lead in the Electoral College necessarily reflected majority popular opinion. The three-fifths clause biased the Electoral College toward Southern candidates; without it, Adams would have led Jackson by eighty-three votes to seventy-seven. True, on the face of things, Jackson had a plurality of the popular vote in those states that allowed their voters to choose the electors. However, in North Carolina Jackson owed victory to the open support of many Adams men; had they held aloof and Crawford won the state, Adams and Jackson would have tied in the Electoral College with eighty-four votes each. Moreover, in Maryland and Illinois the accidents of districting had given Jackson the lion's share of the electoral votes even though Adams had won a popular majority. 'These facts,' according to Congressman Sloane, 'were known to congress at the time of making the choice,' and he was convinced that Jackson 'was not the choice of a majority of the American people.'
"For Jackson may have won a popular plurality in those states where the electorate choose its Electoral College, but what of the six states where the state legislature had chosen the electors and popular presidential preferences had not been directly measured? In Georgia, the preceding state election provided a clear and measurable indication of Crawford's advantage; Vermont and South Carolina were emphatically one-sided, and the size of the popular vote there could be calculated from contemporaneous elections. In Delaware and Louisiana the popular preference could only be guessed, though these lightly populated states could not change any nationwide calculation. Jackson certainly had at least plurality support across all four Southern states taken together, while Vermont belonged to Adams. The sixth state was New York where, in thestate elections in November, 193,000 votes had been cast--enough to swamp the entire national popular vote ofthe leading presidential candidates. Had the proposed electoral bill passed back in March, New York's presidential eklection would have been held at the same time as the state election, and the indications were that Adams would have won 40 percent of the 193,000, Crawford 34 percent, Henry Clay 26 percent, and Jackson none. If that is correct, then across the nation Adams in effect had 34,000 more popular votes than Jackson. Such precise calculations may not have been made in early 1825, but politicians knew that in the most populous part of the country, Adams had tapped a broad current of popular feeling as powerful as that which buoyed Jackson..." Ratcliffe, pp. 233-234
Here are Ratcliffe's tables (of the unofficial popular vote *and* the estimated popular vote in states where the legislature chose the electors). Combining the two tables, he gets the following "estimated grand total": Jackson, 177,884; Adams, 212,697; Crawford, 139,655; Clay, 99,419.
