Last week I wrote a piece about how the election of 1800 was far more important than this one since the fate of America as a democratic nation actually hung in the balance. Today we’re moving on to a pair of elections that make even Bush v. Gore drip with bonhomie in comparison. We tend to think of the election of 1860 as the key election of the 19th Century but that election wouldn’t have ended up where it did without the utter strangeness of 1824 and 1828.

When I was in the third grade I found an amazing book in my school library. It was a book on the whole history of the American Civil war that included these beautifully illustrated pictures of entire battles with the key moments pointed out. I learned to trace the progress of the battles and could tell you what Burnside’s Bridge and Sickles’ Salient were before my friend Ben taught me most of the key swear words. I remember writing a book report in the third grade that mentioned the bloody battle of Shiloh and the way William Rosecrans outmaneuvered Braxton Bragg during the Tullahoma Campaign, as any eight year-old does.[1]

Love of studying the Civil War is bone deep in me. I tell this story not to brag about my prowess at discussing the war,[2] but to point out a serious gap that I know must exist in the American education system. I started studying the Civil War in the third grade. I wrote my first history research paper as a grade school book report on a Bruce Catton history of the Civil War. In college I read a biography on Henry Clay. Through it all I had no idea what the Nullification Crisis was really about and how it fit into the narrative of the Civil War.

Last week I talked about the Alien and Sedition Acts. I talked about Thomas Jefferson and James Madison drafting the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to attempt to bring the many states in as a counterweight to the vast overreach of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and the Federalist Party. The election of 1800 then happened, the big fight fizzled, and Adams and Jefferson eventually began their bromance and wrote a series of letters that became part of the American canon.[3] This left the Nullification fight to the next generation of American politicians.

That next generation of American politicians was, unfortunately, fronted by Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. Of the four only Clay and Webster were actually worth a damn.

Clay had a grand plan called the “American System.” The basic idea was an improvement on the Hamiltonian economic system, including the Bank of the United States, protective tariffs, and central expenditure of government funds to improve infrastructure. This American System went beyond the federalist system in that it advocated the supremacy of the federal government and gave the many states little or no power. Daniel Webster was on board and together they represented the North and West of the country in the Senate. John Quincy Adams was also on board and he helped push some of the agenda through.

John C. Calhoun was a South Carolinian and the representative of Southern interests. He was originally on board with the American System, but gradually came to oppose it. Thus begins the tale of one of the greatest clusterfucks in American history. In 1824 Calhoun was elected Vice President because that’s how we did things back then. There was no clear majority in the four-way race for President and John Quincy Adams managed to snag the title over Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and the other guy. It’s widely believed that JQA got the big chair as a quid pro quo with Henry Clay, who got to be Secretary of State.

This is when Calhoun began to turn against the American System. He didn’t much like Adams’ tariff plans and wasn’t all that big on American involvement in foreign affairs. In the middle of Adams’ term he began to collude with Andrew Jackson to give Jackson the big chair in the election of 1828. This, I imagine, is part of the reason we went over to the system of having the Vice President be part of the President’s actual ticket. Because that’s just bugnuts insane.

Calhoun and Jackson’s supporters began to put together a plan to give JQA the boot. They proposed an extremely high tariff that would be so bad even the merchants in the Northeast would oppose it. This was all in service of political maneuvers designed to break JQA’s cozy relationship with merchants in the Northeast. It ended when JQA called Calhoun’s bluff and signed the Tariff of 1828, or as it quickly became known, the “Tariff of Abominations,” into law.

Andrew Jackson was the first in a line of American war heroes who were elected to the office of the President because Americans are idiots and will vote for any general who comes along.[4] He got the job in 1828 and John C. Calhoun was, once again, Vice President.[5] They ran on a platform of, “Hey, remember that tariff that we got passed? Yeah, we should get rid of it.” Also there was a bunch of stuff about just ending Clay’s American System. Andrew Jackson did not like the Bank of the United States at all and was really the last of the old Democratic Republicans. This is ironic, as he ended up expanding the powers of the Presidency and making Abraham Lincoln’s actions to vastly expand the scope of Presidential power possible.

I am going to pause right here and flat-out state that I do not understand most of what happened between 1824 and 1832. There was a lot of backroom dealing and politics for the sake of politicking going on and there’s no real clear, simple narrative for any of it. This, I believe, is why we don’t cover the Nullification Crisis in schools. None of this shit makes any sense. It’s why history courses mostly focus on how the election of 1828 was about Andrew Jackson’s opponents calling him bloodthirsty because he killed a lot of people in duels and calling his wife a whore because she wasn’t actually divorced like she thought when Jackson married her.

So, here’s an important lesson: maybe don’t cast your vote entirely on the fact that some asshole on Facebook calls one candidate “Killary” and also maybe don’t cast your vote entirely on the fact that the other candidate is a thrice-divorced guy who brags about sexually assaulting women and he’s in the “party of family values” at the moment. I’m not playing the false equivalency card here. I’m just making a point. American elections have always been about distraction from the actual issues at hand, with the possible exception of the Election of 1860, where everyone was pretty much focused on one thing.[6] The fact that Trump is completely unqualified for the office of the presidency and his plans are assembled of spit, bluster, and racism should have disqualified him long before his time with Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood bang bus came to light. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, did not have Vince Foster killed and holy shit shut up about the fucking emails and Benghazi. We as Americans don’t seem to have the patience for anything but the soap opera aspects of our election cycles. This is a problem, since elections are actually important.

The electoral process should be about things that matter. Those things that matter are usually on a layer above the integral question of, “What do we, as a nation, want to be?” In 1828 the fundamental issue was basically the Tariff of 1828, but that sat above the question of whether the North, West, and South could actually gather together and decide on a path forward.

The man who sat at the center of this web was John C. Calhoun. He spent the lame duck period of the JQA administration hanging out in South Carolina anonymously penning the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. This meant that the current and future Vice President of the United States was agitating for Nullification of a federal law and flirting with secession.

It amazes me that we don’t hang John C. Calhoun in effigy every year on his birthday.

Andrew Jackson’s first term as President saw him deploy the US Navy to blockade Charleston and threaten to hang his own Vice President. Said Vice President had, again, colluded with Jackson to give him the office while Vice President under John Quincy Adams. The worst thing about this is that Andrew Jackson was such an ass that this was totally the sort of thing he could have done to anybody for any slight, real or imagined. The fact that he was completely in the right marks John C. Calhoun as a special kind of terrible.

Calhoun’s wife, Floride (that is not a typo, I don’t think), also decided to go after Peggy Eaton on the grounds that she and her husband John had engaged in adultery. John Eaton was the Secretary of War. Peggy Eaton had been married before she divorced and remarried John. This assault on the Eatons’ marriage hit Andrew Jackson close to home because of the allegations raised against him. If there was any admirable quality in Andrew Jackson it was that he loved his wife and stood by another couple going through what he’d been going through.

Martin Van Buren, then Secretary of State, saw the entire cabinet turning against one of their own for an extremely petty reason. He stepped up and resigned his post, which allowed Jackson to fire his entire Cabinet. Van Buren then tried for the position of Minister to Great Britain, which resulted in a tied vote in the Senate. Calhoun voted against him. Van Buren didn’t get that job but was available for the job of Andrew Jackson’s running mate in 1832, because there was no fucking way John C. Calhoun was getting that job again. The Jackson/Van Buren ticket won the election of 1832. In December of 1832 during his personal lame duck period Calhoun resigned as Veep and took over one of South Carolina’s Senate seats.

In early 1833 Congress passed a compromise tariff. They also passed the Force Bill that said the feds could force states to comply with federal law. Calhoun reached into his big bag of tricks to argue against that one and came up with Nullification and hints of secession.

It wasn’t a very good bag of tricks.

The compromise tariff ultimately defused the situation. Nullification lived on, as every terrible idea must. South Carolina would remember how much fun threats of Nullification and secession were and use them to a more effective, but ultimately even more futile end in 1860.