Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/253

Rh the Constitution. Indeed, if carried to its logical consequences, it would have demanded that a candidate receiving an absolute majority of the electoral vote, but a smaller popular vote than another candidate, could not legitimately be President. Nobody could have gone this length. But in 1825 a great cry was raised because a mere plurality was not regarded as a majority, and it had much effect.

When the friends of Jackson and of Crawford began to suspect that Clay favored Adams, their conduct towards him changed abruptly. As they could not persuade him, they sought to drive and even to frighten him. He received anonymous letters full of abuse and menace. Some of them contained threats of personal violence. In others he was informed that, unless Jackson were elected, there would be insurrection and bloodshed. A peculiar kind of fanaticism seems to have been blazing up among Jackson's friends. Their newspapers opened furiously on Clay, and denounced his unwillingness to vote for Jackson as a sort of high treason. But Clay could not be moved. “I shall risk,” he said in a letter to his friend Brooke, “I shall risk without emotion these effusions of malice, and remain unshaken in my purpose. What is a public man worth if he will not expose himself, on fit occasions, for the good of the country?”

At last the Jackson party resorted to a desperate expedient. The election in the House was to take place on February 9. On January 28 a letter