[To say that
this year’s midterm
elections are significant is, I believe, to significantly understate the
case. But crucial as they are, they won’t be the first such significant
midterms, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy five other major midterms, leading up
to a special weekend post on this year’s results. And oh yeah: vote!]
On the
single-party midterms that presaged an era of increasing partisanship and
conflict.
I’ve written before about the incredibly divisive presidential
election of 1800, which, along with other foundational histories such as
the overtly political
origins of the Supreme Court or the battle over the 1798
Alien and Sedition Acts, should lay to rest any arguments that American
government or society has ever been free of political parties or partisan conflicts.
But despite those originating political realities, there was one decade or so
when the U.S. operated as a largely one-party system: the period between about
1815 and 1825, a decade known as the Era of Good Feelings. The
Federalist Party had mostly collapsed on the national level, and virtually all
of Congress as
well as the Presidency were controlled by the Democratic-Republican Party
throughout the period. Although of course there were divisions and battles
within the Democratic-Republican Party, this was still an era of apparent political
solidarity, a time during which Secretary of State and future President John
Quincy Adams could say, in an
October 1817 letter to his nephew John Adams Smith, that, “Party spirit has
indeed subsided through the Union to a degree that I should have thought
scarcely possible.”
Adams was elected president in 1824, but during his first
and only term he and the rest of the nation would learn that perhaps the seeming
absence of party spirit was indeed not possible. The 1824 election alone
highlighted tensions within the Democratic-Republic Party, as Adams was running
against three other Democratic-Republican candidates and one of them, Andrew
Jackson, received more popular and electoral votes; since he did not receive a
majority, however, the election went to the House of Representatives which controversially chose Adams
instead. Jackson supporters spent the next couple of years angrily working
toward the 1826
midterm election, which as a result became perhaps the first truly divisive
such midterm—Jacksonians picked up sufficient seats in the House of
Representatives to claim the majority, with Jackson’s friend and ally Andrew Stevenson
becoming the new Speaker of the House; and they added seats to an existing
Senate majority, giving Jacksonians control over both Houses of Congress and
the ability to directly oppose Adams’ administration. The Good Feelings were no
more.
The ramifications of the 1826 midterms went far beyond just
those next couple years of divided government, or even Jackson’s subsequent and
highly
significant (as well as hugely
destructive) 1828 election to the presidency. The 1826 election also marked
the final endpoint for the nation’s original political parties, as Jackson had separated
from the Democratic-Republicans and run in 1828 under the banner of a new
Democratic Party; his opposition would subsequently reorganize under
another new title, that of the Whig Party. While again there
had been plenty of conflict between the founding era’s original political
parties, this second
two-party system would reach new levels of partisanship and vitriol,
helping usher in a new era in national politics (one not at all unrelated to
the Democratic Party’s gradual but clear connection throughout this era to the
interests of the system of slavery). All illustrations of just how important
and influential a midterm election can be.
Next midterm
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other elections or contexts you’d highlight?
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