Hello, and welcome back to another edition of Lace ‘Em Up’s Presidential Election series for today we will be going over the Election of 1820. It’s one of the strangest elections in American History as incumbent James Monroe runs for a second term and his basically running unopposed.

The Era of Good Feelings

Following the War of 1812, the United States has been feeling a large sense of nationalism which has been called ‘The Era of Good Feelings’ due to it being a time when some Americans were living their best lives….if you don’t count Indians, slaves, or African Americans in general.

After his landslide victory in the previous election, President James Monroe has been doing his best to keep the country united by making decisions most would agree with and since the remnants of the Federalists Party were too weak to nominate a candidate to go against him in 1820, they decided not to. That said, they did nominate a Vice Presidential pick in the form of Richard Stockton from New Jersey, but without a major candidate heading the ticket…The Federalist didn’t stand a chance.

Many Democratic Republicans knew that Monroe and his Vice President Daniel Tompkins would win the election, so most of the party didn’t even show up to the nominating caucus. while Monroe’s presidency did see an era of nationalism sweeping the country, there are a few issues leading into this election that do need to be discussed.

Simmering Tensions

The first major issue surrounds the economy as America has been struggling from a financial crisis due to land speculation and a laxed attitude to regulating the Second National Bank. This led to the country suffering inflation, foreclosures, and high unemployment as a result of “The Panic of 1819”.

President Monroe and his Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford would eventually find a way to settle the financial crisis, but it wouldn’t be until 1821 when the panic finally came to an end.

Another issue the president has to deal with involves the new state of Missouri as plans were in place to bring in Missouri as an official state but some had concerns.

You see, if Missouri was to be brought into the Union then it would probably be a slave state which would upset the balance of free and slave states in the U.S. which certainly isn’t helped after states like Illinois, Alabama and Mississippi were added to the Union as well with the last two states becoming slave states.

Ultimately, Missouri was added to the Union but not before a few things got cleared up; For starters, the area of land that would become Maine was officially a part of the Union as a free state, plus a number of agreements called “The Missouri Compromise” was made in order to draw a line between the Northern parallel of the Louisiana Territories and the Southern boundary of Missouri for which those areas of land would not allow slavery.

The Election of 1820: The Results

As you can see from the map, James Monroe wins all 24 states with the electoral votes from Missouri being counted but there are some strange caveats regarding his victory; First of all, three electors had died and weren’t replaced in time which is why the state of Mississippi only had two electors instead of three or more like all the other states.

Second, around 16% of the population (all of whom were Federalists) voted for ‘No Candidate’ and DeWitt Clinton, the Governor of New York and former presidential candidate in 1812 got 1.8% of the popular vote even though he wasn’t running.

And finally, as you can see from the electoral map Monroe got all but one electoral vote with the faithless elector in question being the former Governor of New Hampshire by the name of William Plumer who voted for then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

Some speculated that Plumer voting for someone else was a way of keeping George Washington’s record as the only president to win all of the electoral votes intact, however this was proven to be false as Plumer really disliked James Monroe…Maybe Plumer wasn’t a fan of the whole “Virginia Dynasty”.

Nevertheless, James Monroe also won with 80.6% of the popular vote which was the third highest percentage of the popular vote for a candidate in an election since the George Washington elections of the 1780’s and 1790’s.  

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