Everybody in the US has heard about Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, just so a white person could sit in it. It was a seminal moment in the civil rights movement, and it happened on this date, December 1, in 1955. Parks probably didn’t choose the date, but it turned out to be the same day that slavery had been abolished in 1834 in the “Cape Colony,” the British colony at the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa.
December 1 was also the day President Lincoln delivered a State of the Union address to Congress in 1862 reiterated that it was necessary to abolish slavery in practice, the same as he had done a few weeks earlier by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. And it was just three years after that, on December 1, 1865, that Shaw University was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina. Shaw was the “mother of African-American colleges in North America”, and the alma mater of the founders of Fayetteville State University, Elizabeth City State University, and North Carolina Central University. Shaw University is still there; it’s a private liberal-arts college.
In 1824 in the US there was a presidential election, and there were no fewer than four candidates. Oddly enough, all four were from the same political party, the Democratic-Republicans. At the time it was really the only major party — it had been founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and by about 1800 its only rival, the Federalist Party, had collapsed. So the Presidential contest was a bit more like what we’d call a primary nowadays, and Henry Clay, William Crawford, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams were vying for the office. In another odd turn, John Calhoun was running for Vice President with TWO of them at the same time: John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Not only that, but Andrew Jackson hadn’t even wanted to run; when he was nominated by the Tennessee legislature, he had retired to his plantation outside Nashville.By the way, it’s called The Hermitage, it’s still there and is now a museum.
The Democratic-Republicans had won the past six elections, and were, obviously, going to win in 1824 too. But the process of putting forward several candidates from the same party turned out to be a disaster — for the party. The general mood of the times had been called the Era of Good Feelings, but the 1824 election was the end of all that. The four candidates represented different regions of the country, so Adams won New England and split the mid-Atlantic states with Jackson. Jackson split the western states with Clay, and split the Southern states with Crawford. There was no clear winner based on votes, and more to the point, no clear winner based on the Electoral College, either. The rules say that when that happens, the House of Representatives decides the issue in a “contingent election.”
Also according to the rules, the House has to pick among the top three candidates, so Clay was eliminated. He and Jackson hated each other, and he and Crawford had very different ideas about the one policy that was at issue in the election: tariffs. So Clay, who was not just a member but the Speaker of the House, decided to support Adams. As the Speaker, he had a lot of influence in the House, and Adams was elected on the first ballot. On December 1. In a contingent election only elected members of the House of Representatives have a vote, and in 1824 the US was somewhat smaller than it is now, so John Quincy Adams was elected President because he got a grand total of 13 votes out of the total of 24. It doesn’t sound like much, but on the other hand, only 3.4% of the population voted at all in 1824. In those days only white male property owners were eligible.
Andrew Jackson, in spite of not having wanted to run in the first place, had gotten the most votes, and had expected the House would choose him. He was reportedly taken aback at the result. He started a bitter campaign, not against Adams, but against Henry Clay, who he thought had “sold” his support to Adams in exchange for being named Secretary of State. The Democratic-Republican party split apart, and by the next election in 1828 Adams was part of new National Republican party. Jackson ran against him as part of the new Democratic Party. Jackson won, and by that time nearly 10% of the population could vote — the “owning property” requirement had been mostly removed, and as long as you were still a white male and 21 or older, you could vote in most places in the country.
The whole set of complications around voting in the US wasn’t a problem elsewhere. For instance, December 1 also marked the crowning of Pedro I as Emperor of Brazil. And that happened in 1822, just two years before Adams was elected. Pedro I of Brazil was also briefly Pedro IV of Portugal for a few months in 1826. He gave up the Brazilian throne in 1831 and returned to home to Portugal, where a civil war was starting. He led the army that won the war, and in spite of having been an Emperor of both Brazil and Portugal, is credited as moving both countries away from monarchy and instituting…of all things…voting.
