✦ THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER ✦

IT WAS A REPUBLIC.
SO THEY FIXED IT.

A republican chronicle of working arrangements, improved into ruin — soberly sourced and cited.

✦ A Register of Grievances

Nation Holds Election; Congress Selects Different Winner to Save Everyone the Trouble

The fix: No man held a majority, so under the Twelfth Amendment the choice fell to the House, voting by state among the top three finishers. Speaker Henry Clay, eliminated in fourth place and no friend of Jackson, swung his influence to John Quincy Adams. On February 9, 1825, thirteen states made Adams president on the first ballot — whereupon Adams named Clay his Secretary of State.

★★★★★ SevereRead the case →

The Union · Slavery, Postponed

Congress Permanently Settles Slavery Question by Drawing Line, Vowing Never to Look at It Again

The fix: The Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, preserving the Senate's tidy equilibrium, and ruled slavery permitted below the line of 36°30′ north and forbidden above it. The crisis passed. The country exhaled.

★★★★★ SevereRead the case → The Economy · The First Bust

Bank Founded to Steady the Economy Steadies It Directly Into a Ditch

The fix: Congress had chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 expressly to bring order to the currency. The Bank instead joined the revelry — lending freely, printing notes to match — until its managers looked at their thinning reserve of gold and panicked.

★★★★★ NotableRead the case →

What Wasn’t Broken

We start with the thing that was working fine — boring, dependable, doing its job.

The "Fix"

Then the improvement: bold, expensive, announced with confidence. Usually unrequested.

The Result

And the receipts — what it cost, what broke, and the citations to prove it.

IT WAS A REPUBLIC.SO THEY FIXED IT.