Handbills, Hymns, and Hogwash: The 1834 Smear Machine That Would Feel Right at Home on Your Phone

Here's a question worth sitting with during the next election cycle: if negative campaigning doesn't work, why does everyone keep doing it?

The answer is that it does work. It has always worked. And the historical record — the largest study ever conducted, as we like to say around here — proves it in ink so vindictive you can practically smell the printer's acid.

The Year the Gloves Came Off

The election of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams usually gets the credit for inventing the modern smear campaign. Adams's people called Jackson a bigamist and a murderer. Jackson's people called Adams a pimp, on the theory that he had once procured a woman for a Russian czar. Pretty rough stuff.

But it was the mid-1830s — the rise of the second party system, when Democrats and Whigs built actual national organizations — that turned mudslinging into an industry. By the 1834 state and congressional races, and again in the 1836 and 1840 cycles, the machinery was fully assembled: partisan newspapers in every county, handbill printers on retainer, campaign songs with lyrics that would make a modern opposition researcher blush.

Rivals printed broadsides accusing each other of infidelity, gambling debts, drunkenness, and cowardice. Songs circulated about candidates' love lives. One Tennessee race saw a candidate's opponents distribute handbills alleging he'd hired a woman to, shall we say, provide services — an accusation that ruined him despite being, like most of these, unverifiable at best.

Notice the pattern. The accusations were personal, not policy. They were cheap to produce, impossible to fully rebut, and optimized for the technology of the day — a handbill pinned to a courthouse door, a song sung in a tavern, a paragraph reprinted from paper to paper like a forward.

Sound familiar?

The Voters Who Claimed to Be Shocked

Here's the part that should humble every pundit in America: contemporaries complained about it constantly. Editorial pages in the 1830s decried the coarseness of campaign literature. Voters told pollsters and diarists they despised personal attacks. Civility was already a nostalgia item.

And then those same voters went to the polls and rewarded the mudslingers. Jackson won. His allies won. The Whigs, having learned the lesson, got nastier and started winning too. The negativity persisted for two centuries because it was never actually punished. Declaring that you hate attack ads while voting for the guy who ran them is one of the oldest moves in the American political repertoire — a psychological constant, not a modern decay.

Experiments on college students today confirm what every 1830s printer knew by instinct: negative information is stickier, processed faster, and remembered longer than positive information. We didn't need a lab for that. We needed a courthouse square and a stack of handbills.

Where the Mud Still Sticks

The good news for the history-minded traveler is that the machinery of the Jacksonian smear is preserved all over the eastern half of the country, often in buildings you can walk into for free.

The Hermitage, Nashville, Tennessee. Jackson's home is the natural starting point. The museum doesn't flinch from the 1828 campaign's brutality — the bigamy charges against Rachel Jackson, which she died of heart trouble shortly before her husband took office, are treated as what they were: a smear with a body count.

The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. This is the mother lode. The AAS holds one of the deepest collections of pre-Civil War political ephemera in existence — actual handbills, broadsides, and campaign songs, the physical artifacts of the dirt. Request a reading-room visit and you can hold the original accusation.

County courthouses, anywhere in Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois. The 1830s campaigns were fought at the county level, and the courthouse squares where handbills were nailed up and speeches were shouted are still the centers of those towns. Stand in the square in any county seat founded before 1840 and you're standing where the rumor mill ran.

The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The chroniclingamerica archive has digitized thousands of partisan newspapers from the era. Search for any candidate's name from 1834 onward and read the attacks in the original — no algorithmic ranking required, just raw, human spite.

The Lesson We Keep Re-Learning

Human psychology hasn't changed in five thousand years. We are wired to remember insults, distrust rivals, and tell ourselves we're above it all. The 1834 campaigns didn't reveal a new American character; they revealed the same old character with a printing press.

So the next time an attack ad airs and the commentary class clutches its pearls, remember the handbills. Remember the songs about infidelity. Remember that the voters who read them said "how disgraceful" — and then voted for the guy who printed them.

They were telling the truth about themselves. So are we.