In 1822, Andrew Jackson was nominated by Rep. Pleasant M. Miller as a candidate for President of the United States in the 1824 elections. The resolution was introduced in the Tennessee State Legislature in Murfreesboro, TN, the state capitol at the time.

Jackson’s nomination created a split in the Democratic-Republican party, the only viable national party at the time. The split led to two different conventions and eventually the two party system that defines American politics today.

By 1824, the Democratic-Republican Party had become the only functioning national party. Its Presidential candidates had been chosen by an informal Congressional nominating caucus, but this had become unpopular. In 1824, most of the Democratic-Republicans in Congress boycotted the caucus. Those who attended backed Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford for President and Albert Gallatin for Vice President. A Pennsylvanian convention nominated Jackson for President a month later, stating that the irregular caucus ignored the “voice of the people” and was a “vain hope that the American people might be thus deceived into a belief that he [Crawford] was the regular democratic candidate.”

The regular “democratic candidate” nominated by the Pennsylvanian convention was Andrew Jackson. He would go on to win the popular vote and the electoral votes in the 1824 elections, but the U.S. House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams in what Jackson called the “corrupt bargain.”

Jackson’s supporters organized what is today’s Democratic Party and later nominated and elected him to the office of President. The half of the party who opposed Jackson became the National Republicans who later became the Whigs.

To this day, the modern Democratic Party is the oldest organized political party in the United States of America and the world, and it was born right here in Murfreesboro, TN.