What's a prez to do? Quincy Adams and Clay

If anyone in American history was groomed to be president from an early age, it was John Quincy Adams. He accompanied his father, John Adams, on the elder man's diplomatic missions to Europe during and after the Revolutionary War. He received diplomatic postings of his own. He watched his father serve two terms as George Washington's vice president and one term as president. He was secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe, in which position he was the principal author of what came to be called the Monroe Doctrine. By then the secretaryship of state had become the accepted springboard to the presidency.

But when Quincy Adams ran for president in 1824, a new political culture was emerging in America. The republic, a form of government in which power derives its legitimacy from the people, was evolving into a democracy, a subspecies of republic in which ordinary people actually exercise power. The avatar of the nascent democracy was Andrew Jackson, hero of the 1815 battle of New Orleans. Before Jackson, popular appeal hadn’t been decisive in politics at the highest level. But in 1824, when Jackson ran against Adams, enthusiasm for Old Hickory seemed likely to carry the day.

It almost did. Jackson won a plurality of both the popular vote and the electoral vote but a majority of neither. The lack of a majority of electors threw the race into the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would cast one vote. In the House, Henry Clay of Kentucky, the speaker of that chamber, would have great influence. Clay had been a candidate in the election, challenging both Jackson and Adams, but he didn't win enough electoral votes to make the final round in the House. He couldn't become president but might determine who did.

Clay thought Adams a decent man well trained and suited to be president. His judgment of Jackson was just the opposite. He deemed Jackson belligerent and intemperate. He lamented Jackson's inexperience of politics. At a personal level, he resented Jackson's rise as the popular figure of the West. Clay—Harry of the West, he was called—didn’t like being upstaged by Jackson.

Clay concluded that Adams would make a much better president than Jackson. Employing his knowledge of the membership of the House and its rules, he was instrumental in delivering the victory to Adams.

Jackson and his supporters were outraged. In this dawn of the age of democracy, the will of the people, expressed in Jackson's plurality of the popular vote, had been defied and defeated. 

This was only the beginning of the outrage of the Jacksonians. Adams had to staff his administration. In particular he had to choose a secretary of state. He wanted a capable individual, one whose views on foreign affairs paralleled his own, and who had friends in Congress. None fit the job description better than Clay.

But Adams understood that making Clay secretary of state—and heir apparent to the president—would push the Jacksonians into paroxysms. Jackson had been defeated but hadn't lost his following. The general and his rank and file could cause serious problems for Adams. Perhaps this was sufficient cause for him to choose someone other than Clay.

Adams’s father John Adams had never mastered politics, allowing himself to be beaten after one term by Thomas Jefferson. The apple fell close to the tree in this regard, for Quincy Adams was equally at a loss in politics. Perhaps he thought the rage of the Jacksonians would burn itself out before the inevitable rematch. Perhaps he simply put principle above politics. Whatever his reasoning, he went ahead with the Clay appointment.

And in 1828 he reaped the whirlwind, being trounced by Jackson both in the popular vote and in electors. 

This might have been the end of the Quincy Adams story in American public life. Most former presidents, thinking their moment of glory gone, retire to uncontroversial worthy causes. But Quincy Adams hurled himself back into the political fray, in the comparatively humble role of congressman from Massachusetts. And he took a stand in the front ranks of the opponents of slavery. He was still waging the good fight when a stroke felled him in the Capitol, where he died.