ey insisted that their candidate was the
choice of the people so far as a superiority of preference had been
indicated, and that therefore he ought to be also the choice of the
House of Representatives. It would be against the spirit of the
Constitution and a thwarting of the popular will, they said, to prefer
either of his competitors. The fallacy of this reasoning, if reasoning
it could be called, was glaring. If the spirit of the Constitution (p. 172)
required the House of Representatives not to _elect_ from three
candidates before it, but only to induct an individual into the
Presidency by a process which was in form voting but in fact only a
simple certification that he had received the highest number of
electoral votes, it would have been a plain and easy matter for the
letter of the Constitution to have expressed this spirit, or indeed to
have done away altogether with this machinery of a sham election. The
Jackson men had only to state their argument in order to expose its
hollowness; for they said substantially that the Constitution
established an election without an option; that the electors were to
vote for a person predestined by an earlier occurrence to receive
their ballots. But besides their unsoundness in argument, their
statistical position was far from being what they undertook to
represent it. The popular vote had been so light that it really looked
as though the people had cared very little which candidate should
succeed; and to talk about a manifestation of the _popular will_ was
absurd, for the only real manifestation had been of popular
indifference. For example, in 1823 Massachusetts had cast upwards of
66,000 votes in the state election, whereas in this national election
she cast only a trifle more than 37,000. Virginia distributed (p. 173)
a total of less than 15,000 among all four candidates. Pluralities did
not signify much in such a condition of sentiment as was indicated by
these figures. Moreover, in six States, viz., Vermont, New York,
Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, the electors were chosen
by the legislatures, not by the people; so that there was no correct
way of counting them at all in a discussion of pluralities. Guesses
and approximations favored Adams, and to an important degree; for
these six States gave to Adams thirty-six votes, to Jackson nineteen,
to Crawford six, to Clay four. In New York, Jackson had hardly an
appreciable following. Moreover, in other State