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ALS, one page, 7.75 x 9.75, February 21, 1823. Handwritten letter to influential political economist Tench Coxe, explaining that he and Thomas Jefferson have chosen not to endorse a candidate in the forthcoming 1824 election, allowing the public to 'do their own research' instead; he also apologizes for being unable to provide requested documents, fearing that they were burnt during the British attack on Washington during the War of 1812.
In part: "Since I rec'd your two letters…I have hitherto been prevented from acknowledging them first by some very urgent calls on my time, and afterwards by an indisposition which has just left me. I have forwarded the letters with the printed papers to Mr. Jefferson. I know well the respect he, as well as myself, attaches to your communications. But I have grounds to believe that, with me also, he has yielded to the considerations and counsels which dissuade us from taking part in measures relating to the ensuing Presidential Election. And certainly if we are to judge of the ability with which the comparative pretensions of the candidates will be discussed, by the examples sent us, the public will be sufficiently enabled to decide understandingly on the subject. I know you too well to doubt that you will take this explanation in its just import, and will remain assured that it proceeds from no diminution of confidence or regard towards you. I have made a search for the documents of which you wish the loan, but without success. I am not sure that some of them were preserved in my collection. If they were, it is probable they were among bundles which during my long exile from private life and alterations in my dwelling, were removed into damp situations, where they perished, or included in parcels carried to Washington in order to be assorted & bound, where they had the fate of many other articles in 1814." In fine condition.
A successful Philadelphia merchant, Tench Coxe was appointed by President George Washington as the first Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1789 to 1792, before acting as a revenue commissioner for the remainder of Washington's term. In the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Coxe was in charge of most government procurement—including the purchase of all military and naval supplies, except rations—as purveyor of public supplies. He retired from public service in 1818, spending his remaining years as an influential writer on political and economic subjects, while continuing to correspond with his political friends.
In early 1823, the following year's presidential election was shaping up to be an odd one: the Federalist Party had effectively collapsed, leaving the Democratic-Republican Party as the United States' only major national political entity. Following the precedent set by his forebears, President James Monroe declined to seek re-nomination for a third term, and Vice President Daniel Tompkins was ruled out due his poor physical and financial health, leaving the field wide open. Infighting within the party led to the promotion of several different Democratic-Republican candidates: the Congressional caucus nominated Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford of Georgia. Supporters of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Speaker of the House Henry Clay denounced the caucus decision; the Massachusetts legislature then nominated Adams for President and the Kentucky legislature nominated Clay. Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who had been previously nominated for president by the Tennessee legislature in 1822, was again nominated by a convention of Democratic-Republicans in Pennsylvania.
Thus, all four candidates were Democratic-Republicans, each representing a different faction of the party: Crawford was strong among voters in the southeast, Adams in the northeast, Clay on the frontier, and Jackson in parts of the west, south and mid-Atlantic. Obviously, the support of popular former presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would help to tilt the scales in favor of any given presidential candidate. Coxe publicly opposed John Quincy Adams, whose support of restrictive European laws regarding gun ownership for hunting, Coxe felt, undermined the entire right to keep and bear arms which was guaranteed in the United States by the Second Amendment, authored by Madison as part of the Bill of Rights. Clearly, Coxe had hoped to sway Madison into publicly endorsing a candidate, but Madison gracefully declines, believing in the informed American voter's ability to judge each nominee for himself.
Ultimately, although Andrew Jackson won the most electoral votes (99) and the most popular votes (40.5%), none of the four candidates received the requisite 131 electoral votes needed for election as president, and the matter was turned over to the House of Representatives. Henry Clay's voters threw their support behind John Quincy Adams, who earned a place in the White House and named Clay as his secretary of state—a move that Jackson's supporters decried as a 'corrupt bargain.' Coxe would not live to comment, passing away four months before the presidential election of 1824.
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