At noon on Friday, Jan. 20, the United States will have had three consecutive eight-year presidencies for only the second time in its history. The only other such moment came at noon, March 4, 1825, 192 years ago.
That’s a bit surprising, given George Washington’s example of retiring after two terms as president and the rule established by the 22nd Amendment, passed after Franklin Roosevelt won third and fourth terms in wartime, imposing a two-term limit. It owes something to the tragic happenstance that the four presidents who were assassinated might well have completed two terms otherwise.
There are some striking contrasts between the 24 years that ended in 1825 and the 24 years ending this Friday. The three eight-year presidents then — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe — were Virginians who were, despite some tussles, political allies and members of the same political party. Their houses were a day’s ride then (an hour’s drive today) from each other.
The last years of Monroe’s administration were dubbed by historians as the Era of Good Feelings. The opposition Federalist party didn’t run a candidate in the 1820 election and held only a handful of seats in Congress.
No one would call any large part of the last 24 years an era of good feelings. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were each succeeded by a president of the other party. Parties opposing the president had majorities in the House of Representatives for 14 and in the Senate for 11½ of the 24-year period. All three presidents were re-elected, but with just 49, 51 and 51 percent of the vote.
Clinton was impeached in 1997, Bush was administered an electoral “thumping” in 2006 and Obama received similar treatment in 2010 and 2014. Although Clinton and Bush refrained from blaming their problems on their predecessors, Obama stopped doing so only as his second term was nearing its end.
But there are similarities to the pair of three consecutive eight-year presidencies as well. The so-called Era of Good Feelings followed a war as divisive and inconclusive as Iraq. The War of 1812 inspired threats of secession by New Englanders and is celebrated by Canadians as a victory. Americans took solace only from the treaty negotiated by John Quincy Adams and the victory won in New Orleans by Andrew Jackson after the treaty was signed but before the news crossed the ocean.
Congress was split over the issue of slavery in the territories, settled by compromise in 1820 by the admission of Missouri as a slave state and Maine, detached from Massachusetts, as a free state. It was “a fire bell in the night,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “a knell for the union, hushed indeed for the moment, but … a reprieve only, not a final sentence.” It would ring again, more loudly, four decades later.
And the inauguration 192 years ago evoked more cries of illegitimacy than this year’s. There were four major candidates, each claiming the mantle of Jefferson’s party. Jackson won a plurality of popular votes (though legislatures chose electors in six states) and in the Electoral College, but Adams was a close second, while third-place finisher William Crawford was crippled by a stroke.
The House of Representatives, where Henry Clay was the longtime speaker, spurned Jackson and chose Adams, who promptly named Clay secretary of state — though Clay had opposed Adams’s policies when he held that office.
“A corrupt bargain!” shouted Jackson backers, not without cause, just as President-elect Trump’s opponents keep reminding us that Hillary Clinton won a plurality (not a majority, as some say) of the popular vote. But both the 6th and the 45th presidents were chosen in scrupulous accord with the Constitution.
Jackson’s supporters kept up the clamor and elected him unambiguously four years later; Adams, as his father had when Jefferson beat him 28 years before, skipped the inauguration. From their conflict sprang the Democratic and the Whig, and eventually the Republican, parties.
Jackson was regarded as a wild man, impetuous, unfit for the presidency, by Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. Each surely preferred the scholarly, internationally experienced Adams.
Similarly, all of Trump’s three eight-year predecessors — Clinton, Bush, Obama — take a similar view of Trump, though all three accepted invitations to his inauguration. But many other presidents — Lincoln, both Roosevelts, plus some duds — had no support from living predecessors. Trump is not quite so unprecedented as many of those unversed in history think.
