The Democratic-Republican Party had split into various factions during the 1824 election, based more on personality than on ideology.

When the election was thrown to the House of Representatives, House Speaker Henry Clay had backed Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to deny the presidency to Senator Andrew Jackson, a longtime personal rival and a hero of the War of 1812.

Before the elevation of Adams to the presidency in 1825, the Democratic-Republican Party, which had been the only truly national American political party for over a decade, had begun to dissolve, losing its infrastructure and identity.

Its caucuses no longer meet to select candidates.

After the election of 1824, factions had developed in support of Adams and in support of Jackson.

Adams politicians, including most ex-Federalists (such as Senator Daniel Webster of New Hampshire and even Adams himself), will gradually evolve into the National Republican party, and those politicians that support Jackson will soon help form the modern Democratic Party.

The protective tariff bill of 1828 is meant to protect industry in the northern United States from competing European goods by causing the prices of those goods to rise.

Vice president John Caldwell Calhoun, until now a strong nationalist, is a South Carolinian and thus strongly against the tariff.

Webster, who had opposed the increases of 1824 and 1816, backs the bill, perhaps influenced by New England’s rising mill-owning families, the Lawrences and the Lowells.

Freshman Senator John Tyler of Virginia, a strict state-rights Democrat, opposes it.

Senator Martin Van Buren of New York, who continues to lead both Senate opposition to President Adams and dominate New York State politics through the Albany Regency, takes no part in the debate but votes for the measure in obedience to instructions from the New York legislature.

Congress’s passage of the bill, which the state of South Carolina calls the "Tariff of Abominations," widens the growing rift between North and South and sets up President John Quincy Adams for a fall in the pending election.

Adams signs the act, although he realizes it will be used to discredit him politically.

Jackson, his political credentials burnished by his failed bid for the presidency in 1824, since many voters believe the "man of the people" had been robbed by the "corrupt aristocrats of the East", allies himself with Vice-President Calhoun; together they build a coalition.

In a storm of mudslinging and character assassination by both sides, Jackson, now a candidate under the banner of the new Democratic Party and promising tariff revision, unites farmers and workers, who call themselves "Jackson Men," against Eastern capital.

Unlike the 1824 election, no other major candidates appear in the race, allowing Jackson to consolidate a power base.

Adams decides, not without reason, to attack Jackson's ethics and moral character.

The notorious Coffin Handbills, produced by Charles Hammond, a colonel in the U.S. Army and a friend and political ally of Secretary of State Henry Clay, attacked Jackson for his courts martial and execution of deserters, for his massacres of Indian villages, and for his habit of dueling.

Jackson's marriage comes under attack: when he had married his wife Rachel, the couple had believed that she was divorced; however, the divorce was not yet finalized, so he had had to remarry her once the legal papers were complete.

In the hands of the Adams campaign, this becomes a scandal.

One of Hammond’s pamphlets asks: “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and christian [sic] land?” Another handbill claims that Jackson's mother was a prostitute brought by British soldiers to the United States.

Jackson and his supporters decried the use of such tactics, but Adams did not escape attack.

The Jackson campaign charges that Adams, while serving as Minister to Russia, had surrendered an American servant girl to the appetites of the Czar.

Adams is also accused of using public funds to buy gambling devices for the presidential residence; it turns out that these were a chess set and a pool table.