Presidential Election of 1820

IN THE U.S. presidential election of 1820, James Monroe, the incumbent president, and Daniel D. Tompkins, the incumbent vice president, ran unopposed. This had happened before in 1789 and 1792, when George Washington was elected without any serious opposition. In 1820, there was little world tension, the Democratic-Republican Party was in control of much of the country, the Federalist Party had collapsed, and there was no new opposition party. The period was to become known in U.S. history as the Era of Good Feeling. There were a number of new states that had been admitted to the Union since the 1816 U.S. presidential election: Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), Missouri (1820), and Maine (1820), although there were some problems with Missouri's statehood and, hence, the validity of its Electoral College votes, as had been the case with Indiana in 1816. As Monroe and Tompkins were effectively unopposed, there was little in the way of an election campaign.

The system of choosing electors still varied considerably. There were now 235 electors, with Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, New York, South Carolina, and Vermont, leaving the choice of electors to the state legislature, with Alabama and Missouri opting to follow the same system. In New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia, the electors were chosen by all the voters in the state, the winner receiving the Electoral College seats. Connecticut had moved from choice by the state legislature to a statewide vote, and Mississippi also decided to have a statewide vote, the first newly admitted state to opt for a direct statewide vote for many years. Kentucky, Maryland, and Tennessee continued to divide their states into electoral districts, which could result in the votes of the state being split; Illinois also adopted this system. Massachusetts and Maine (which had been a part of Massachusetts until the Missouri Compromise of 1820), abandoned the choice by the state legislature, returning to the original system of having two electors chosen by voters statewide (as for the U.S. senate), and the remainder chosen by congressional districts.

In the November election, with people in 15 of the 24 states voting, James Monroe received 87,343 votes (80.6 percent), 17,465 people (16.1 percent) voted for Federalist electors; 1,893 people voted for DeWitt Clinton, and 1,658 voters chose unpledged electors. When the Electoral College met on December 6, there were only 232 electors; three electors, one from Mississippi, one from Pennsylvania, and one from Tennessee had died and had not been replaced by the time the college met. It was the last time that William Floyd, from Mastic, Long Island, served on the Electoral College, having been a member of the eight previous Electoral Colleges. The vote was not, however, unanimous. Monroe won with 231 votes, with a single elector, William Plumer, casting a vote for John Quincy Adams, then the secretary of state.

It is not certain why William Plumer voted as he did. He had been born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and when he was nine years old, his family had moved to New Hampshire. Studying law, he was elected to the state legislature on many occasions, [Page 564]becoming speaker of the state house in 1791 and 1797. A friend of Thomas Jefferson, he was a member of the U.S. Senate from 1802 until 1807, and then became active in the Democratic-Republican Party before being elected as governor of New Hampshire after an acrimonious election campaign. With the vote so close, the state legislature eventually opted for Plumer. After ending his term in 1819, Plumer became a presidential elector. It has been suggested that Plumer voted for Adams to ensure that George Washington would be the only U.S. president who was the unanimous choice of an Electoral College, but it has also been suggested that Plumer, at the end of his political career, preferred Adams to Monroe, and voted as he did as a matter of principle.

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