https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/08/20/the-dirtiest-presidential-campaign-ever-not-even-close/
It was the election of 1800 where President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson—the two highest elected officials in the land and each a pivotal player in the creation of our nation—squared off in a race for the White House and established a tradition of negative campaigning that would cause our current candidates to blush with embarrassment. Not unlike much of the mud-slinging we experience in modern elections, the dirty work, back in the earliest days of the nation, was often left to surrogates. One such surrogate was
the influential President of Yale University, a John Adams supporter, who publically suggested that were Jefferson to become the president, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” The concern was amplified by an influential—and highly partisan—
Connecticut newspaper’s warning that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”
And that was the soft stuff. Not to be outdone by the Federalist president’s attacks, Jefferson had a few negative narratives of his own to pitch. One particularly stinging attack came via one James Callender—an influential journalist of the time whose incendiary pamphlets had been secretly funded by Thomas Jefferson and who had an axe to grind for having been prosecuted and imprisoned by the Adams Administration for violating The Sedition Act.
Callender wrote that Adams was a rageful, lying, warmongering fellow; a "repulsive pedant" and "gross hypocrite" who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character." For those who may not deal in such terminology, a hermaphrodite is one who has both male and female organs. Ouch.
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The campaign of 1800 set the standard for dirty presidential campaigns in America‑one that would be taken to new heights during the election of 1828. The race was between President John Quincy Adams and his challenger, military hero Andrew Jackson. By the time Jackson prevailed in the race, the headlines would be filled with charges of murder, adultery, and pimping—headlines printed in highly partisan newspapers that make amply clear that today's media has nothing on our ancestors when it comes to pursuing a political agenda.
Because Jackson’s wife, Rachel, had previously been married to another man before hooking up with General Jackson, a question was raised by those aligned with the sitting president as to whether or not she had been properly divorced from her first husband before marrying Jackson. As a result, the Democratic candidate was accused of being an adulterer and running away with another man’s wife while Mrs. Jackson was labeled a bigamist.
Not to be outdone,
the Jackson campaign fired back by accusing Adams of having lined up an American girl for the pleasure of the Russian Czar during Adams’ time as Ambassador to Russia. And lest you think that these charges were the result of legitimate journalistic investigation, Andrew Jackson was known to write letters to the editors of sympathetic newspapers, giving them instructions on how to counter the opposition attacks while providing material for editors to use in launching scurrilous attacks on Jackson’s opponent who happened to be the President of the United States. For the record, there is historical evidence suggesting that Jackson and his wife had, indeed, married without the benefit of Rachel having first obtained a divorce while the charges of pimping lodged against President John Quincy Adams were completely false. Nevertheless, Jackson won.
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