Did emergence of the modern party system cause the decline in Presidential quality after Jackson?

[Aurelius]

As I've been on my biographical tear through the Presidents, I can't help but notice that the quality of the men who held that office took a sharp decline at the exact moment that Van Buren engineered the modern party system and then became the first product of that system to ascend to our highest office. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of our first seven presidents are consistently ranked in the top half, even those with major black marks on their record (Adams - Sedition Act, Jackson - Indian Removal). I've observed that those who came before the party system had a much more statesmanlike approach to the office, with much less resort to narrow sectional and ideological prejudices than those who came after them. I've been thinking about whether this is due to the emergence of the party system or some other factor, or a combination. Other factors: the first 7 presidents were of the revolutionary generation in some way, or presidents in the antebellum era were uniquely bad in some way due to some structural factor that disappeared after the civil war. Any thoughts?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Part of it is the office itself being limited in scope and power compared with today. Presidents of the preceding period were famous for non-Presidential things. Jefferson gets bumped up for things that occurred way before he was President. This is arguably true for all of them through Jackson in some form or another. Quincy Adams made a name for himself in diplomacy, Jackson on the battlefield.

Many of the Presidents afterwards just didn't have that kind of pre-Presidential grandeur, even the Generals and two of them died early in their Presidencies. This feeds into the notion that men of smaller stature figuratively speaking, would sort of shrink in the office.

[Asenath Waite]

No, I think political parties are vital for Democracy. All of the presidents IMO who left any sort of positive legacy came after that point, people like Lincoln, Grant, TR, FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ who with varying degrees of success made the country a better place, expanded rights and improved people's standards of living. I'm inherently suspicious of anybody who thinks that we had better president's in an era in which slavery existed and only white male property owners could vote.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

If we're talking specifically about the antebellum presidents, I would argue a far more significant factor was the unwieldy nature of both major party coalitions (particularly the Whigs), necessitating nondescript, preferably apolitical nominees who could appeal to all elements of their party. Hence Clay was passed over for Harrison (who walked into the River Styx and reemerged as the nonideological Hero of Tippecanoe) in 1840 and Taylor (who had no opinions and had never voted in his life) in 1848, Webster denied the nomination in 1836 (for being too northern) and 1852 (for being too southern), Van Buren was dumped for Polk in 1844, and so on. The "great men" of the age simply had too many enemies to be elected, whereas the parade of war heroes and dark horses who governed from 1837-1861 were too anonymous to be reviled by anybody, at least until after the election. Maybe this cost us a few "great" presidents in among those twenty-odd years, but on the other hand the same impulse also gave us Abraham Lincoln, who was so obscure that newspapers announcing his nomination initially identified him as "Abram" Lincoln.

But I think another factor might be that the politicians of this era—presidents or otherwise—tended to be short-sighted in ways that are painfully obvious to us who know what was waiting at the end of the antebellum. Had Washington or Jefferson served in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, they would not be the beloved figures they are today: the antebellum was a stink that clung to everyone who lived through it, and even giants like Clay and Webster come off looking pretty bad in hindsight. It was an age when "narrow sectional and ideological prejudices" prevailed, and the shoddy presidents who characterized it were the symptom rather than the cause of its degeneracy.