But the victorious general was still the same Andrew Jackson; he did not leave New Orleans without exhibiting some of the characteristics that were so well known in Tennessee. Relaxing none of his vigilance, he kept the city under martial law after the British had sailed, and even after the British admiral had sent him word of the peace. Many New Orleans people protested, and certain of them claimed exemption from the work of defense on the ground that they were citizens of France. All such he ordered out of the city. Mr. Louaillier, a leading citizen, published a protest, and Jackson promptly arrested him. Judge Hall, of the United States District Court, issued a writ of habeas corpus for the prisoner, and Jackson as promptly arrested the judge himself, and did not release him until, early in March, official notice of the peace was received. The judge fined the general a thousand dollars for contempt of court, and nearly thirty years afterwards the American Congress voted money enough to repay the sum with interest. Between the battle and the news of peace, Jackson also signed the order for the execution of six militiamen whom a court-martial had found guilty of mutiny and desertion. There were circumstances which seemed to recommend these men to mercy, and in after years the order was cited along with other things to prove that Jackson was a cruel and arbitrary commander.

However, the War Department gave him only the mildest of reproofs for his treatment of the civil authorities at New Orleans, and when he returned to Tennessee it was to a welcome even more heartfelt and stirring than the one he got on his return from the Creek war. In the autumn he was called to Washington to consult with his superiors about putting the army on a peace footing, and on the journey and at the capital he was universally received as the hero of the war. The army was reduced to ten thousand men, and distributed into a northern and a southern department. The command of the northern department was given to General Jacob Brown; Jackson got the southern department.

It was about this time that Governor Alston, of South Carolina, got a letter from his father-in-law, Aaron Burr, of New York, concerning the approaching presidential election. Burr thought Monroe, the leading candidate and the man preferred by President Madison, too weak a man for the great office. He wanted a man of firmness and decision, and he added, "that man is Andrew Jackson." But as yet Jackson himself had no such ambition. As late as 1821, in fact, he said, in reply to a suggestion that he might be President: "No, sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way; but I am not fit to be President." He cordially supported Monroe in 1816, and after his election wrote to him and made a few suggestions about his administration. One of these suggestions was to appoint a Federalist, Colonel William Drayton, Secretary of War. Jackson declared that, had he been in command in New England, he would have hanged the leaders of the Hartford Convention; but he was in favor of recognizing the loyalty of such Federalists as had served the country faithfully during the war. That letter to Monroe was "copied" for the general by his neighbor and friend, William B. Lewis, as were hundreds of others. The general himself was a poor writer, and Major Lewis was a skilful man with a pen. He was also an exceedingly clever politician, and he showed his cleverness by keeping a second copy of the letter to Monroe for future use. In the course of the correspondence, Monroe let Jackson know that he himself might be Secretary of War if he chose; but Jackson was content with his command.



V

THE SEMINOLES AND THE POLITICIANS

For three years General Jackson was mainly occupied with the duties of a military officer in time of peace; but he was also employed to make treaties with several Indian tribes, and won another royal welcome home from the Tennesseans by throwing open to settlement large areas of Indian lands. Even in peace, however, he found an opportunity to display his readiness to do the right thing in a way to make trouble. Being several times annoyed by orders issued direct from the War Department to his inferiors, and seeing clearly that this was not the proper procedure, he issued a general order forbidding his subordinates to obey any commands which did not reach them through him. Calhoun, who became Secretary of War soon afterwards, conceded the justice of the general's position, but Jackson's course in the matter was certainly rather high-handed. General Winfield Scott criticised it in private conversation, and a mischief-maker brought his words to Jackson's attention. The result was some fiery and abusive letters to Scott, and a challenge to a duel, which Scott, on religious grounds, very properly declined. Jackson also carried on an angry correspondence with General Adair, of Kentucky, who defended the Kentucky troops from the charge of cowardice at New Orleans.

It was late in the year 1817 before General Jackson was again called to active service in the field. Once more the call was from the southward, and his old enemies, the Red Sticks, the English, and the Spaniards, were all in some measure responsible for it. A number of Red Sticks had taken refuge with their kinsmen, the Seminoles, in Florida. Colonel Nichols and a small force of British had also remained in Florida some time after the war ended, and had done things of a nature to stir up the Indians there against the Americans across the border. Negro slaves, escaping from American masters, had fled to the Spanish province in considerable numbers, and a body of them got possession of a fort on the Apalachicola River which had been abandoned by the British. To add to the disorder of the province, it was frequented by adventurers, some of them claiming to be there in order to lead a revolution against Spain, some of them probably mere freebooters. The Spanish authorities at Pensacola were too weak to control such a population, and Americans near the border were anxious to have their government interfere. The negro fort was a centre of lawlessness, and some American troops marched down the river, bombarded it, and by a lucky shot blew up its magazine and killed nearly three hundred negroes. Troubles arose with the Indians also, and Fowltown, an Indian village, was taken and burned. A considerable body of Indians took to the war-path, and Jackson was ordered to the scene.

Impatient as ever with the Spaniards, he wrote to President Monroe: "Let it be signified to me through any channel (say Mr. J. Rhea) that the possession of Florida would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished." Monroe was ill at the time, and for some reason did not attend to the general's letter for a year. The President was trying to get Florida peaceably, by purchase, and not by conquest. Jackson, however, got the idea that his suggestion was approved, and acted accordingly.

Raising troops in Tennessee on his own authority, he marched rapidly to the scene of trouble, crossed the border into Florida, and in a few weeks crushed the Seminoles. Of fighting, in fact, there was very little; what there was fell almost entirely to the friendly Indians, and not a single American soldier was killed. But Jackson's actions in the campaign brought on the bitterest controversies of his career. By his order four men were put to death, and he captured Pensacola again, claiming that some Indians had taken refuge there. Two of the four men were Creek Red Sticks. The other two were white men and British subjects. One was Alexander Arbuthnot, an old man of seventy, a trader among the Indians, and, so far as is known, a man of good character. He was taken prisoner, however, and it is supposed a letter he wrote to his son, telling him to take their merchandise to a place of safety, warned some Indians of Jackson's approach. The other British subject was an Englishman named Robert Ambrister, who had been a lieutenant in the British army. He was nephew to the governor of New Providence, one of the British West Indies, and seems to have been in Florida rather in search of adventure than for any clearly ascertainable purpose. A court-martial found Arbuthnot guilty of inciting the Creek Indians to rise against the United States, and of aiding the enemy. Ambrister was found guilty of levying war against the United States. He was first sentenced to be shot; then, on reconsideration, the court changed the sentence to fifty stripes and hard labor for a year. Jackson firmly believed that both were British emissaries, sent to Florida to stir up the Indians. He disapproved the change of Ambrister's sentence, and ordered him to be shot and Arbuthnot to be hanged.

Such fierce and energetic measures, whether justifiable or not, put an end to the disorder on the border, and Jackson was again free to return home a victor. The country was disposed to approve what he had done, but the President and Cabinet saw that grave international questions would be raised; for Jackson had invaded the soil of a country at peace with the United States, taken possession of its forts, and put to death citizens of another country also at peace with the United States. John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina, the Secretary of War, was in favor of censuring the general for his conduct; but John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts, the Secretary of State, thought his acts necessary under the circumstances, and declared himself ready to defend them. In the end he did defend them so well that neither Spain nor Great Britain made serious trouble over them. The President and his Cabinet followed Adams's advice instead of Calhoun's, and Calhoun himself, as Jackson's superior, wrote to him about the campaign in a friendly way. Jackson naturally thought that Calhoun had been his friend in the Cabinet, and had no reason to suspect that it was Adams who defended, and Calhoun who wished to censure him. He did not learn the truth for many years. Had he known it sooner, there is no telling how different the political history of the next twenty years might have been.

For henceforth Jackson was to be a great figure not in warfare but in politics. His military career was practically ended. He kept his commission until July, 1821, but from this time he fought no more battles. He had not, as a soldier, given such evidence of military genius as to set his name alongside those of the great captains of history, but he had shown himself a strong and successful leader of men; in his masterful, often irregular and violent way, he had done his country good service. Were his place in history merely a soldier's, it would be a safe one, though not the highest. But his actions in the field soon gave him the leading part on a different stage. One day in January, 1819, he rode up to the house of his neighbor, Major Lewis, who had just bought a new overcoat, and asked him to get himself another; the general wanted the one already made to wear on a long journey. "Major," he said, "there is a combination in Washington to ruin me. I start to Washington tomorrow."

The chief of those who, as Jackson firmly believed, were combined to ruin him, was the man who could with best reason be compared to the hero of New Orleans for the place he had in the affections of the Western people and as the representative of the new American spirit, born of the second war with Great Britain. If Jackson was the hero of the war, Henry Clay was its orator; if it was Jackson who sent from one quarter the news of a glorious victory, it was Clay who, with Adams and Gallatin, had secured the peace. Leaving Ghent, Clay was lingering in Paris when he heard the news of New Orleans. "Now," he exclaimed, "I can go to England without mortification." But the great orator was not in sympathy with Monroe's administration. His enemies declared he was in opposition because he was not asked to be Secretary of State, and because he feared that Adams, who had the place, would become President four years later. However that may have been, it was Clay who led the attack on the administration about the campaign in Florida. Protesting his deep respect for "the illustrious military chieftain" who commanded there, he yet condemned the hanging of the two Red Sticks, the execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, the taking of Pensacola.

From the moment Jackson read that speech he was Clay's enemy, and a warfare began that lasted twenty-five years. Every man, in fact, who in the course of the long debate that followed condemned the acts of General Jackson in Florida was written down an enemy on the tablets of his memory. He remained in Washington until the House had voted down every resolution unfavorable to his course, and he had thus won his first victory over Clay. Then he set forth on a northern journey which showed him the immense popularity he had in places like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and gave him an opportunity to increase it by the fine appearance he made in public. He returned to find that a Senate committee had reported unfavorably on his conduct, but the Senate never acted on the report, and on his journey homeward the people gave him every reason to believe that the great majority of his countrymen approved the votes of the lower house. As if to complete his triumph, he was soon called once more to Florida; and this time he entered Pensacola, not as a soldier invading a foreign province, but as the chief magistrate of an American territory. In February, 1821, after so many years of negotiation, Florida was bought by the United States. President Monroe appointed Jackson governor and commissioner to receive the province, and he, bidding farewell to the army, entered again upon the duties of a civil office.

Even in his farewell to his troops, Jackson took occasion to attack a policy recently favored by his superior, General Jacob Brown, and any one who knew Jackson might have guessed that the holding of a civil office would never keep him from violent courses, particularly in Pensacola. He held the office only a few months, for he was in wretched health. His wife, who was with him, tells in one of her letters how pale and solemn he was when he rode into Pensacola for the third time, and how ill he was while he was there. He resigned in October, but before he resigned he had made another cause of dispute with Spain. The retiring Spanish governor, Callava, was accused of attempting to carry away papers which were necessary to establish the property rights of a quadroon family. The correspondence on the subject led to a series of misunderstandings, and General Jackson was soon convinced that villainy was afoot. The upshot of the dispute was that the American governor put the Spanish governor in jail; and when the United States judge of West Florida, a curious character named Fromentin, tried to mend the matter with a writ of habeas corpus, he fared little better than Judge Hall of New Orleans had fared before him.

Mr. Parton's laborious investigation of this comical affair enables him to show that the estate over which the trouble arose was of no value whatever, and that Jackson's chivalrous impulse to defend a family he thought wronged led him into a very arbitrary and indefensible action. As usual, his motives were good, but his temper was not improved by his illness or by the fact that Callava, who seems to have been a worthy gentleman, was a Spaniard, and had been governor of Florida. Jackson had a rooted dislike of Spanish governors, and doubtless congratulated himself and the country that there would be no more of them in Florida, when, for the last time, he turned northward from Pensacola to seek The Hermitage and the rest which his diseased body sorely needed.

The Hermitage was by this time a good place to rest in, for it had grown to be a Southern plantation home, quite unlike the bare homes which sheltered the first settlers of that neighborhood, and it had its full share of the charm that belonged to that old Southern life. It was the seat of an abundant hospitality. The fame of its master drew thither interesting men from a distance. His benevolence, and the homely charity of his wife, made it a resort for many of the neighborhood whom they two had befriended, for young people fond of the simple amusements of those days, and for ministers of the Gospel, whom Mrs. Jackson, an extremely pious woman, liked especially to have about her. For his wife's sake, the general built a tiny church on the estate, and always treated with profound respect the religion which he himself had not professed, but which he honored because Mrs. Jackson was a Christian. Indeed, there is nothing in the man's whole life more honorable than his perfect loyalty to her. She was a simple, uncultivated, kind-hearted frontier woman, no longer attractive in person, and a great contrast to the courtly figure by her side when she and the general were in company. It is certainly true that the two used to smoke their reed pipes together before the fire after dinner, and that custom, to one ignorant of American life in the Southwest, would stamp them as persons of the lowest manners. Yet it is also true that "Aunt Rachel," as Mrs. Jackson was commonly called by younger people of the neighborhood, was loved and honored by all who knew her. The general had not merely fine manners, but that which is finer far than the finest manners: he had kindness for his slaves, hospitality for strangers, gentleness with women and children. Lafayette was at The Hermitage in 1825, and his noble nature was drawn to Jackson in a way quite impossible to understand if he was nothing more than the vindictive duelist, the headstrong brawler, the crusher out of Indians, the hater of Britons and Spaniards, which we know that he was. Lafayette found at The Hermitage the pistols which he himself had given to Washington and which, with many swords and other tokens of the public esteem, had come to the hero of New Orleans. The friend of Washington declared that the pistols had come to worthy hands, notwithstanding that his host was equally ready to display another weapon with the remark, "That is the pistol with which I killed Mr. Dickinson."

It seems clear that Jackson honestly meant to spend the rest of his days at the Hermitage. His friend Eaton, a Senator from Tennessee, had already written his life down to New Orleans, and probably he would have been content, so far as his public career was concerned, to let finis follow the name of his greatest victory. But Eaton himself, and Major Lewis, and other friends, and the vast public which his deeds had stirred, would not let him alone. Within a year of his retirement, a group of his friends were working shrewdly to make him President of the United States. In 1823, John Williams, who was an enemy to Jackson, came before the Tennessee legislature for reelection to the United States Senate. Jackson's friends were determined to beat him, and found they could do it in only one way. They elected Jackson himself. In that, as in all the clever political work that was done for him, Major Lewis was the leading man. Before the time came to choose a successor to President Monroe in 1824, Tennessee had declared for her foremost citizen, and Pennsylvania, to the surprise of the country, soon followed the lead. The sceptre was about to pass from the Virginian line, and from all the great sections of the Union distinguished statesmen stepped forward to grasp it. From Georgia came William H. Crawford, a practiced politician; from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, the subtlest of reasoners; from Kentucky, Henry Clay, the orator; from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams, the best trained of public servants. Only Tennessee offered a soldier.

It was twenty-six years from the end of Jackson's first service in Congress to his second appearance in the Senate. Again he showed himself unfit to shine as a legislator, but in spite of that he was now clearly the most marked figure in the upper house. None of his rivals were Senators. Clay was the Speaker of the House; Adams, Crawford, and Calhoun were in the Cabinet. Jackson probably did not occupy more than ten minutes of the Senate's time during the whole session, but his fame and his candidacy made his votes on the tariff and internal improvements important data to politicians. The country was already entered upon the second period of its history, in which there was to be no French party and no English party; in which a voter should choose his party on account of its position on such questions as the tariff, internal improvements, and the bank, or on account of the general view of the Constitution which it favored. But as yet no clear division into such parties had come about. The old Federalist party was no longer in the field, and no other had arisen to take its place. It was a time of personal politics. The first question was, Who is to succeed Monroe? and the next question, Who is to succeed the successor of Monroe?

Jackson found some firm friends awaiting him in Washington, and he soon added to their number by becoming reconciled to some old enemies. Among the old friends was Livingston, now Congressman from Louisiana. One of the old enemies was the Senator from Missouri, whose chair was next his own; for the Senator from Missouri, a rising man in Washington, was Thomas H. Benton. According to Benton's account, Jackson made the first advance, and they were soon on friendly terms, though Benton continued to support Clay, whose niece he had married. General Winfield Scott made an overture, and Jackson cordially responded. Even with Henry Clay he was induced by mutual friends to stand on a footing of courteous friendliness, though there never was any genuine friendship between them.

Against Crawford, the Georgian candidate, and at first the leading candidate of all, he had a grudge that dated from 1815. Crawford was Secretary of War at that time, and, contrary to Jackson's advice, had restored to the Cherokees certain lands which Jackson had got from the Creeks by the treaty of Fort Jackson, but which the Cherokees claimed. When Crawford offered himself against Monroe in 1816, Jackson was ardently for the Virginian; and now, when it was apparent that the caucus of Republican Senators and Representatives would probably nominate Crawford, Jackson's friends joined the friends of other candidates in opposing the caucus altogether, so that in the end only sixty-six persons attended it, and its action was deprived of the weight it had formerly had in presidential contests. Before the election, Crawford was stricken with paralysis, and this greatly weakened his chances.

Both Calhoun and Adams were on friendly terms with Jackson. Jackson still supposed that Calhoun had defended the Florida campaign in the Cabinet. His good feeling toward the South Carolinian was doubtless strengthened when Calhoun, who had relied on the support of Pennsylvania, gracefully yielded to Jackson's superior popularity in that quarter, and withdrew from the contest. It was then generally agreed that he should be Vice-President, and probably General Jackson, like many others, was willing that he should restore the old order of things according to which the Vice-President, instead of the Secretary of State, stood in line of succession to the presidency.

Adams was Secretary of State, and as such he had rendered Jackson important services by defending his actions in Florida. Adams, in diplomacy, believed in standing up for his own country quite as resolutely as the frontier general did in war. Nor were they far apart on the tariff and internal improvements, the domestic questions of the day. Adams's diary for this period shows a good feeling for Jackson. In honor of the general, Mrs. Adams gave a great ball January 8, 1824, the anniversary of New Orleans.

The election turned, as so many others have turned, on the vote of New York, which Martin Van Buren, an astute politician, was trying to carry for Crawford. He did not succeed, and there was no choice by the people. Jackson led with ninety-nine votes in the electoral college; Adams had eighty-four, Crawford forty-one, Clay thirty-seven. In some States the electors were still chosen by the legislature. Outside of those States Jackson had fifty thousand more votes than Adams, and Adams's vote was nearly equal to Crawford's and Clay's combined. For Vice-President, Calhoun had a large majority.

Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives had now to choose a President from the three leading candidates. Clay was Speaker, and had great influence over the House, but his own name had to be dropped. Beaten himself, he had the power to make any one of his three rivals President of the United States.

It was a trying situation for him and for the three citizens whose fate he seemed to hold in his hands. Crawford was so ill that Clay could not seriously consider him. Adams had never liked Clay, though they generally agreed about public questions, and the ardent Kentuckian could never have found the cold manners of the New England statesman attractive. But from the first he preferred Adams to Jackson, thinking a mere "military chieftain" unfit for the office. On the 9th of February, Adams was elected. That evening he and Jackson met at a presidential reception. Of the two, the defeated Westerner bore himself far more graciously than the successful candidate from New England.

Up to this time, no unseemly conduct could be charged against any one of the four rivals. But the human nature of these men could not bear to the end the strain of such a rivalry. For many years the jealousy and hatred and suspicion it gave birth to were to blacken American politics. Jackson was guilty of a grave injustice to Clay and Adams; and they, by a political blunder, delivered themselves into his hands. Jackson and his friends charged them with "bargain and corruption." Adams, by appointing Clay Secretary of State, and Clay, by accepting the office, gave their enemies the only evidence they ever had to offer of the truth of the charge. Every other semblance of a proof was shown to be worthless, and the characters of the two men have convinced all candid historians that the charge was false. But there was no way to prove that the charge was false. Jackson believed it, and from this time he made war on Clay and Adams. He believed he had a wrong to right, a combination of scoundrelly enemies to overthrow, a corrupted government to purify and save. The election had shown him to be the most popular of all the candidates, and his friends, of whom Benton was now the foremost, contended that the House ought to have chosen him in obedience to the people's will. Until he should be elected, he and his followers seemed to feel that the people were hoodwinked by the politicians.

Hitherto, since his second entrance into public life, he had borne himself as became a soldier whose battles were already fought. Webster had written of him: "General Jackson's manners are more presidential than those of any other candidate. He is grave, mild, and reserved." But now he was once more the Jackson of the tavern brawl, of the Dickinson duel. Politics had come to be a fight, and his friends had no more need to urge him on. He resigned his place in the Senate, and was at once, for the second time, nominated for President by the Tennessee legislature. With untiring industry and great political shrewdness, Lewis, Eaton, Benton, Livingston, and others of his friends set to work to get him elected. The campaign of 1824 was no sooner ended than the campaign of 1828 was begun.

It was an important campaign because it went far to divide the old Republican party, to which all the candidates of 1824 had belonged, into the two parties which were to battle for supremacy throughout the next quarter of a century. The division was partly a matter of principles and policies, but it was also a matter of organization.

As to principles and measures, Adams was disposed to revive those policies which the old Federalist party had adopted in the days of its power. He had left that party in 1808, not because he had given up its early principles, but because he believed that its leaders, particularly in New England, in their bitter opposition to Jefferson, had gone to the point where opposition to the party in power passes into disloyalty to the country. In the Republican party he always acted with those men who, like Henry Clay, favored a strong government at Washington and looked with distrust on any attempt of a State to set up its own powers against the powers of the United States. As President, he wished the government to take vigorous measures for defense, for developing the country by internal improvements, for protecting American industries by heavy duties on goods imported from other countries. He thought that the public lands should be sold at the highest prices they would bring, and the money used by the general government to promote the public welfare. He had no doubt as to the government's power to maintain a national bank, and thought that was the very best way to manage the finances.

Jackson himself was not a free-trader, and had committed himself to a "proper" tariff on protection lines; but during the campaign he was made to appear less of a tariff man than Adams. He had also voted for certain national roads and other internal improvements, but he had not committed himself sweepingly to that policy. He doubted the constitutionality of a national bank. As to the public lands, he favored a liberal policy, with the object of developing the western country by attracting settlers rather than raising money to be spent by the government. On the general question of the powers of the government he stood for a stricter construction of the Constitution and greater respect for the rights of the States than Adams believed in. So, notwithstanding Jackson's tariff views, the mass of the people held him a better representative of Jeffersonian Democracy than his rival.

But a party is an organization, and not merely a list of principles. It is, as some one has said, a crowd, and not merely a creed. Jackson's managers so organized his supporters that they became a party in that sense much more clearly than in the sense of holding the same views. Committees were formed all over the country somewhat on the order of the committees of correspondence of Revolutionary times. Newspapers were set up to attack the administration and hold the Jackson men together. Everywhere Jackson was represented as the candidate of the plain people against the politicians. In all such work Major Lewis was active and shrewd, and before the end of the campaign, from another quarter of the union, Jackson won a recruit who was already a past master in all the lore of party politics. Martin Van Buren was a pupil in the political school of Aaron Burr, and was recognized as the cleverest politician of a State in which the sort of politics that is concerned with securing elections rather than fighting for principles had grown into a science and an art. New York was then thought a doubtful State, and the support of Van Buren was of the utmost value.

It is probable that so far as Adams and Jackson differed on questions of principle and policy, a majority of the people were with Jackson. But it is also clear that the campaign was fought out as a sort of personal contest between the Southwestern soldier and the two statesmen whom he accused of bargain and corruption. It was a campaign of bitter personal abuse on both sides. Adams, perhaps the most rigidly conscientious statesman since Washington, was accused of dishonesty, of extravagance, of riches, of debt, of betraying his old friends, the Federalists, of trying to bring Federalists back into power. Against Jackson his enemies brought up his many fights and duels, his treatment of Judge Hall and Judge Fromentin, the execution of Woods and the six militiamen, of the two Indians, of Arbuthnot and Ambrister. Handbills were distributed, each decorated with a coffin bearing the name of one of his victims. His private life was attacked. The scandal of his marriage was blazoned in newspapers and pamphlets. Even the unknown grave of his mother was not spared.

So it became largely a question of the two men, and which the people liked best. Adams, coldly virtuous, would not turn his finger to make himself better liked; even if he had attempted the arts of popularity, he was, of all the eminent men of our history, the least endowed with charm of manner, speech, and bearing. He sternly refused to appoint any man to office for supporting him, or to turn any man out of office for opposing him. He could not be winning or gracious on public occasions. Ezekiel, the shrewd old brother of Daniel Webster, wrote to him after the election that even in New England men supported Adams "from a cold sense of duty, and not from any liking of the man." It took a New England conscience to hold a follower in line for the New England candidate. The man of the Southwest won many a vote where the voter's conscience did but half consent. Wherever he went, he made bitter enemies or devoted friends, rather than cold critics and lukewarm admirers. Adams was an honest man, but nobody had ever called him "Old Hickory." He was an ardent patriot, and could point to many wise state papers he had written, to a report on weights and measures which had cost him four years of patient labor; but he could not, like his rival, journey down the Mississippi and celebrate the anniversary of a great victory in the city he had saved. His followers might ably defend his course on public questions, but what was it all worth if the people kept on shouting, "Hurrah for Jackson"?

Of all the sections of the country only New England gave Adams a solid support. Jackson swept the West and South and carried the great States of Pennsylvania and New York. In Tennessee, nineteen men out of twenty voted for him. There is a story of a traveller who reached a Tennessee town the next day and found the whole male population pursuing with tar and feathers two reckless citizens who had voted against "the general." In the electoral college he had one hundred and seventy-eight votes to Adams's eighty-three. Calhoun was again chosen Vice-President.

The poor boy had won his way to the White House, but it was a worn old man, bowed down with a heavy sorrow, who journeyed across the mountains to take the great prize. The cruel campaign scandal about his marriage had aggravated a heart trouble from which his wife had long suffered. She died in December, and his grief was appalling to those who gathered at The Hermitage to do honor to "Aunt Rachel." It was not in Jackson's nature, as indeed it would not have been in the nature of many men, to forget, in his grief, the enemies who had helped to cause it. His old age, like his youth, was to be cursed with hatred and the thought of revenge.



VI

THE WHITE HOUSE

March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson became President of the United States. A great crowd of strange-looking men went to see him inaugurated. "They really seem to think," wrote Webster, "that the country has been rescued from some great danger." Whoever else may have thought so, Jackson certainly held that opinion. As his wont was, he saw the danger and the villainy which he thought himself commissioned to destroy in the person of a man; and that man was Henry Clay. Martin Van Buren was to succeed Clay as Secretary of State in the new Cabinet, but he did not reach Washington until after the 4th of March. Jackson accordingly sent his friend, Colonel Hamilton, of New York, to the State Department, ordering him to take charge there the instant he should hear the gun which was to announce that the new President had taken the oath of office.

Jackson and Clay were, in fact, the leaders of the two parties into which the old Republican party was now divided. Their rise to leadership meant that a new set of public men and a new set of questions had come to the front; it meant a more thoroughgoing experiment of democracy than had yet been tried in America. Adams's administration is properly considered to have been the last of one series and Jackson's the first of another. Under the earlier Presidents, national affairs were committed mainly to a few trained statesmen, the people simply approving or disapproving the men and the measures brought before them, but not of themselves putting forward candidates for the higher offices or in any wise initiating policies. The rule of the people was thus a passive sort of rule, a rule by consent. But with the wide prevalence of manhood suffrage, and the prominence of domestic questions,—of questions concerning the business and the daily life of the Republic,—and with the disappearance of the profound questions concerning the organization of the government and the nature of government in general, the people began to assert themselves. Under Jackson and his successors, they made themselves felt more and more at Washington; their opinions and sentiments, their likes and dislikes, their whims and prejudices, were projected into their government. Henceforth, public men were to be powerful not so much in proportion to their knowledge of statecraft as in proportion to their popularity. They must represent the popular will, or commend themselves and their policies to popular favor. The public men of the old order, like Adams, might be wise and faithful, but they lacked Clay's and Jackson's sympathetic understanding of the common people. And of the two new leaders Jackson had by far the stronger hold on the popular mind and heart. The people had sent him to Washington because he was of them and like them, and because they liked him. Both he and they felt that he was their President, and he held himself responsible to them only.

It seemed, too, that with the new questions and the new men there was coming a new sort of politics. Jackson meant to serve the people faithfully, but he entered upon the duties of his great office in the spirit of a victorious general. The sort of politics most in accord with his feeling was the sort of politics which prevailed in New York and Pennsylvania. Jackson once declared, "I am not a politician, but if I were, I should be a New York politician." Before long, a leading New York politician, Senator Marcy, expressed the sentiment of his fellows when he said, "To the victors belong the spoils." That was a sentiment which a soldier President could understand. In that letter to Monroe which Major Lewis wrote for him twelve years before, and which won him votes, he had urged that partisan considerations should not control appointments; but before he had been President a year he removed more men from office than all his predecessors had removed since the beginning of the government. When he left Washington, the practice of removing and appointing men for political reasons was so firmly established that the patient work of reform has not to this day destroyed it. That, to many historians, was the gravest fault of Jackson's administration. It was, however, merely New York methods applied to national politics, and it was a perfectly natural outcome of Jackson's conviction that the people had sent him there to drive out the men who had control of the government.

In fact, unless we understand President Jackson himself, we cannot possibly understand his administration; for President Jackson, though he was now somewhat subdued in manner, and "By the Eternal" was not quite so often on his lips, was still Jackson of the duelling pistol and Jackson of the sword; and he was also still the Jackson whom Benton saw with the lamb and the child between his knees. All men were still divided for him into friends and enemies. The party opposed to him came soon to call itself the National Republican Party, and later the Whig Party, while his own followers were called Democratic Republicans, or Democrats. But to Jackson the National Republicans were the friends of Henry Clay, as the Democrats were his own friends. So, too, of the great questions he had to deal with. In every case he was fighting not merely a policy or an institution but a man.

For a time, however, his arch-enemy, Clay, disappeared from the scene. Until the autumn of 1831, he was in retirement in Kentucky. Jackson had the field to himself, and was at first occupied with his friends rather than his enemies.

Van Buren, as Secretary of State, was the head of the new Cabinet. The other members were not men of great distinction. They had, however, one thing in common: in one way or another, they had all opposed Mr. Clay. On other points they differed. Half of them were friends of Calhoun, and wished to see him President after Jackson. They were also divided into married men and a widower, Mr. Van Buren being the widower. That, as things turned out, was a very important division indeed.

Jackson did not treat his Cabinet as other Presidents had treated theirs. He had a soldier's idea of organization, and did not think it necessary to consult the Cabinet members about all the measures he planned. He treated them somewhat as a general treats his inferior officers, though with several of them, especially Van Buren and Eaton, his relations were very cordial and intimate. When he wished advice, however, he was more apt to seek it of his friend, Major Lewis, whom he had persuaded to accept an appointment, and who lived with him at the White House, or of Isaac Hill, who had come to Washington after fighting the Adams men in New Hampshire, or of Amos Kendall, who had dared to oppose Clay in Kentucky, or of General Duff Green, editor of "The Telegraph," the Jackson organ. These men, personal friends of the President, came to be called the "Kitchen Cabinet;" and at least three of the four were shrewd enough to justify any President in consulting them. Hill and Kendall were both New England men by birth, and had all the industry and sharpness of mind proverbially characteristic of Yankees. Even Major Lewis did not surpass Kendall in political cleverness and far-sightedness; he was a "little whiffet of a man," but before long the opposition learned to see his hand in every event of political importance anywhere in the country. If a Democratic convention in Maine framed a resolution, or a newspaper in New Orleans changed its policy, men were ready to declare that it was Kendall who pulled the wire. Historians are fond of saying that it was such men as Kendall and Lewis who really ruled the country while Jackson was President; and it is true that by skilful suggestions, by playing upon his likes and dislikes, much could be done with him. But it is equally true that when he was once resolved on any course his friends could no more stop him than his enemies could. A clerk in the State Department won his favor by a happy use of the phrase, "I take the responsibility," and from that time was safe even against the displeasure of Secretary Van Buren. A member of Congress began a successful intrigue for office by begging for his father the pipe which the President was smoking, ashes and all. A clerk in the War Department attracted his attention by challenging a man to a duel, and so started himself on a career that ended in the Senate. Secretary Van Buren called on Peggy Eaton and supplanted Calhoun as the heir apparent to the presidency. Jackson in good humor was the easiest of victims to an artful intriguer; but, unlike the weak kings whom scheming ministers have shaped to their purposes, he could not be stopped when once he was started.

It was Peggy Eaton who made a division between the married men and the widower of the Cabinet. She was the wife of Senator Eaton, who was now Secretary of War, and the widow of a naval officer named Timberlake. Her father was a tavern-keeper named O'Neill, and both Jackson and Eaton had lived at his tavern when they were Senators, and Mrs. O'Neill had been kind to Mrs. Jackson. The O'Neills had no place in Washington society, and there were ugly stories about the conduct of Mrs. Timberlake with Senator Eaton before the death of Timberlake, who killed himself at sea. Washington society believed these stories. President Jackson refused to believe them, and became Mrs. Eaton's champion. His zeal in her cause knew no bounds, and he wished his secretaries and their wives to help him. But the Cabinet ladies would not visit or receive Mrs. Eaton, and their husbands refused to interfere. Calhoun, the Vice-President, also declined to take up Mrs. Eaton's cause. Mr. Van Buren, a widower, showed the lady marked attention.

For once in his life, Andrew Jackson was defeated. Creeks and Spaniards and Redcoats he could conquer, but the ladies of Washington never surrendered, and Peggy Eaton, though her affairs became a national question, never got into Washington society. Jackson, however, did not forget who had been his friends in a little matter any more than if it had been the greatest affair of state.

It was already a question whether Calhoun or Van Buren should lead the Jackson party at the end of the one term which Jackson had declared to be the limit of his stay in the White House. Calhoun's friends in the Cabinet, and General Duff Green, of "The Telegraph," were active in his interest. Van Buren, however, was constantly growing in favor with the President. When at last Jackson discovered that Calhoun, as a member of Monroe's Cabinet, had wished to censure him for his conduct in Florida, he and the Vice-President broke forever. Meantime, a great public question had arisen on which the two men stood out as representatives of two opposite theories of the Union. The estrangement begun over Peggy Eaton widened into a breach between a State and the United States, between the nullifier of the laws and the defender of the Union.

For the pendulum had swung, and it was no longer the Federalist merchants of New England, but the planters of the South, and particularly of South Carolina, who were discontent with the policy of the government. New England had turned to manufactures some of the energy she had formerly given to commerce and seafaring, and was now in favor of a protective tariff. Webster, her foremost man at Washington, had voted against the tariff of 1816, but had changed his mind and supported a higher tariff in 1824, and a still higher in 1828. The planters of the South had not found it easy to develop manufactures with their slave labor. They had little or nothing, therefore, to protect against the products of European countries. On the contrary, they exported much of their cotton to England, and imported from England and other countries many of the things they consumed. Accordingly, they were, as a rule, opposed to the whole system of tariff taxation, and desired free trade. Many of them also opposed the system of internal improvements, both on constitutional grounds and because they felt that the tariff made them pay more than their share of the expense of such undertakings.

On the question of internal improvements Jackson soon took a stand entirely pleasing to the opponents of the system. In his first message to Congress he declared against it, and when Congress passed a bill subscribing money to the stock of the Maysville and Lexington road, one of the chief internal improvements so far undertaken, and an enterprise specially favored by Clay, he promptly vetoed it. Other such measures he vetoed unless it was clear that a two-thirds majority in each House would pass them over his veto. He preferred that the money received from the sale of public lands should be distributed among the States, believing that they, instead of the general government, should undertake the improvements necessary to the development of the country.

Jackson had, indeed, great respect for the rights of the States under the Constitution, and warned Congress not to go beyond the powers which were clearly given to the general government. The State of Georgia had long been discontent because the Indians were not removed from her borders, and the President sympathized strongly with her feeling. As soon as he was elected, the Georgia legislature passed an act dividing up the Cherokee country into counties, and extending over them the civil laws of the State. The act was plainly contrary to treaties between the Indians and the Federal government, but the President refused to interfere. On the contrary, he withdrew all United States troops from the Indian country, and left the State to deal with the Indians as it chose. Later on, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the Georgia law was unconstitutional because it took away the treaty rights of the Cherokees. "John Marshall has made his decision," said Jackson, "now let him enforce it." The President, in fact, was heartily in favor of removing the Indians, and before he went out of office the last of the Southern tribes had given up its old home for a new one in the West.

Jackson's collision with Chief Justice Marshall over this question had very far-reaching effects, which historians have somewhat neglected in their study of the consequences of his course on other questions. No statesman, no President, had done so much as the great Chief Justice to make the general government strong and to restrain the States. Jackson, disagreeing with some of Marshall's views, never lost an opportunity to put on the bench a man of his own way of thinking. The result was that many years later, when, in a great crisis, the supporters of the national government and the leaders of States about to break away from the Union looked to the Supreme Court to decide between them, the voice that came from the august tribunal spoke words which Marshall and Story would never have uttered, but which the champions of the States heard with delight.

On these important questions, then, President Jackson acted like an extreme Jeffersonian Democrat. But the South Carolinians soon found that if he was ready to keep the general government from interfering with any right that could reasonably be claimed for a State, he was equally ready to stand up for the Union when he thought a State was going too far.

He had nothing to do with the tariff of 1828. In his first message he suggested that some modifications of it were desirable, and pointed out that the public debt would soon be paid, and it would be advisable to reduce certain of the duties. But modification was too mild a word to suit the South Carolinians. The law was the outcome of the clamor of many selfish interests, and Congressmen opposed altogether to protection had helped to make it as bad as possible, hoping that it might in the end be defeated. When it passed, the South Carolina legislature vigorously protested, and began at once to debate about the best plan of resistance. The plan finally preferred was for the State to declare the law unconstitutional, and therefore null and void, and call on other States to join in the declaration. If the national government tried to enforce the law in South Carolina, she would protect her citizens, and as the final resort withdraw from the Union. The plan was first placed before the American people in an "Exposition and Protest" adopted by the South Carolina legislature in 1828; and the real author of that famous document, though the fact was not then known, was the Vice-President, Calhoun. The associate of Clay in those acts which had made a beginning of internal improvements and of protection, long a statesman of the strong-government school, Calhoun had been led by the distress and discontent of his own people to examine the Constitution again, "in order," as he said afterwards, "to ascertain fully the nature and character of our political system," and had now come to a change of views.

The nullification doctrine came before Congress in the winter of 1829-30, and was debated in the most famous of American debates. Clay was not there to speak for his tariff system, but a greater orator than Clay took up the challenge. In the greatest of all American orations since Patrick Henry spoke for liberty, Webster spoke for union and liberty, and Americans will never forget his words until liberty and union are alike destroyed. Jackson was the last man in the country to miss their force. No orator himself, he yet knew how to give words the power of a promised or a threatened deed. Not long after the debate, there was a public dinner of the States'-Rights men in Washington to celebrate Jefferson's birthday. Jackson did not attend, but he sent a toast, and probably the seven words of his toast were more confounding to the nullifiers than all the stately paragraphs of Webster's oration. It was: "Our Federal Union: it must be preserved." Calhoun's toast was: "The Union,—next to our liberties the most dear,"—and Jackson, who was just learning that he had been mistaken about Calhoun in 1818, began now to see clearly that the great South Carolinian was in sympathy with the nullifiers. Many South Carolinians, however, were still hoping that the President would not take any active measures to defeat their plan. Some of them went on hoping until the Fourth of July, 1831, when there was read, at a public dinner of Union men at Charleston, a letter from Jackson which left no doubt of what he meant to do if they kept on. He was going to enforce the laws and preserve the Union.

Having by this time broken utterly with Calhoun, he desired to rid himself of those cabinet members who were Calhoun's friends, and to that end took the bold and unexampled step of changing his cabinet entirely,—only Barry, the postmaster-general, being kept in office. Van Buren fell readily into the plan, gave up his portfolio, and was at once appointed minister to Great Britain. Edward Livingston took his place. A change in the "Kitchen Cabinet" followed. General Duff Green would not desert Calhoun, and so "The Telegraph" ceased to be the organ of the administration. Instead, Francis P. Blair, of Kentucky, who, like Amos Kendall, had been first the friend and then the enemy of Clay, was called to Washington, and set up "The Globe," which soon became a power for Jackson. Nor were these the only consequences of the break with Calhoun. Jackson and his closest friends were by this time bent on making Van Buren, instead of Calhoun, President after Jackson, but were doubtful of their ability to accomplish it at the next election. The President was therefore persuaded to run again. The Democrats in the legislature of Pennsylvania, acting on a hint from Lewis, sent him an address urging him to stand. If for a time he hesitated, he ceased to hesitate when it became apparent that Clay was going to be the candidate of the National Republicans. Clay, yielding to the appeals of his party friends, reappeared in the Senate at the opening of Congress in December, 1831, and now the duel between the two great party leaders grew fiercer than ever.

Clay returned to the Senate to find his tariff policy attacked by the nullifiers, his internal improvements policy blocked by the President's vetoes, and still a third policy which he and his party firmly supported vigorously attacked by the terrible man in the White House. The National Bank was in danger. Its charter expired in 1836, and the President in both his annual messages had gravely questioned the wisdom of granting another. He questioned the constitutionality of setting up such an institution, and he questioned the value and safety of the Bank as it existed. December 12, 1831, the National Republicans, assembled in their first national convention at Baltimore, nominated Clay for President, and called on the people to defeat Andrew Jackson in order to save the Bank. Jackson dauntlessly accepted the issue and gave the country to understand that either he or the Bank must go to the wall. For the time, even Calhoun and the nullifiers yielded the first place among his enemies to Clay, Biddle, and the Bank.

Biddle was president of the Bank, a handsome, accomplished man, a graceful writer, and a clever, though not always a safe financier. His ready pen first brought him into disfavor. Isaac Hill and Levi Woodbury, the Democratic Senators from New Hampshire, made complaints of Jeremiah Mason, an old Federalist, who was president of the Branch Bank at Portsmouth. Their charges were various, but they and others gave Jackson the idea that the Branch Bank in New Hampshire had used its power to oppose his friends and to help the Adams men. Biddle was called on to investigate. He did so, and defended Mason against all the charges. A long correspondence ensued, and Biddle went from Philadelphia, where the head Bank was, and made a visit to Portsmouth. His letters to the Secretary of the Treasury were courteous, well written, but also defiant. It was the Jackson men, he said, who were trying to draw the Bank into politics, and the Bank had constantly refused to go into politics in any way. He made out a very good case indeed, but the longer the correspondence lasted the stronger grew Jackson's conviction that the Bank was in politics, that it was fighting him, that it was corrupt, that it was dangerous to the liberties of the plain people who had sent him to the White House. Congress took up the matter, and committees of both Houses reported in favor of the Bank. The Supreme Court had already decided that the act establishing it was constitutional.

Clay boldly determined to force the fighting both on the tariff and on the Bank. The great measures of the Congress of 1831-2 were a new tariff law and a new Bank charter. The public debt was now nearly extinguished, and it was clearly advisable to reduce the revenue; but Clay and his followers made the reductions almost entirely on articles not produced in America, and so, in defiance of the nullifiers, made the new tariff as protective as the old. Jackson had gradually given up most of his protection ideas, and so the tariff did not please him. Clay, in fact, declared that for his "American system," as he called it, "he would defy the South, the President, and the Devil." Jackson was further defied by the Senate when it refused to confirm the nomination of Van Buren to be minister to Great Britain. The struggle raged through the whole session. Benton sturdily defended the President; Clay, Webster, and Calhoun were all, in one way or another, against him. It was a great session for the orators, and so far as Congress was concerned Clay had his way. But Lewis and Kendall were not idle; they were working not on Congress but on the people. In May, the Democrats nominated Jackson for President and Van Buren for Vice-President. In July, Congress finished its work with the Bank charter, and Jackson promptly answered with a veto, and so the two parties went to the country.

Jackson went into the campaign with an advantage drawn from his successful conduct of two foreign negotiations. His administration had secured from England an agreement by which the trade with the West Indies, closed to Americans ever since the Revolution, was opened again, and from France a promise to pay large claims for spoliations on American commerce which had been presented many times before. He was also undoubtedly supported by the great majority of the people in the stand he took against the nullifiers. What the people would decide about the tariff was doubtful; but as between a system, even though it were called the American system, and an old hero, the Democrats were not afraid of the people's choice. The great fight was over the Bank, and on that question Jackson was supported by the prejudices of the poor, who thought of the Bank merely as a rich men's institution, by the fears of the ignorant, who believed the Bank to be a mysterious and monstrous affair, and by the instinct of liberty in many others, who, though they did not believe the charges against Biddle, did feel that there was danger in so powerful a financial agency so closely connected with the government.

Moreover, the opposition was divided. A party bitterly opposed to Free Masonry had sprung into existence, and Jackson was a Mason. But the Anti-Masons, instead of supporting Clay, nominated a third candidate. South Carolina threw her votes away on a fourth.

Jackson got 219 electoral votes to 49 for Clay, 11 for Floyd, the nullification candidate, and seven for Wirt, the Anti-Mason candidate. His popular vote was more than twice Clay's, and he actually carried the New England States of Maine and New Hampshire. If, during his first term, he exercised his great office like a general, he entered upon the second with even a firmer belief that he ought to have his way in all things. The people had given an answer to Clay and Biddle and Calhoun and Marshall; to the corrupters of the government and the enemies of the President; to the nullifiers of the law and the slanderers of Peggy Eaton. He understood his overwhelming victory as the people's warrant to go on with all he had begun.

But neither the nullifiers nor the Bank were willing to give up. In November, 1832, a South Carolina convention passed an ordinance, to go into effect February 1, 1833, nullifying the tariff law, and took measures to defend its action by force. Jackson promptly sent Winfield Scott to South Carolina to make ready for fighting, employed a confidential agent to organize the Union men in the State, and called on Edward Livingston to help him with an address to his misguided countrymen. The pen of Livingston and the spirit of Jackson, working together, made the Nullification Proclamation a great state paper. It was a high-minded appeal to the second thought and the better nature of the Carolinians; an able statement of the national character of the government; a firm defiance to all enemies of the Union. It was the most popular act of the administration, and brought to its support men who had never supported it before. Benton and Webster joined hands; even Clay, who, like Jackson, loved his country with his whole heart, supported the President. Calhoun, alone of all his famous contemporaries, stood out against him. He left the Vice-President's seat, came down upon the floor as a Senator, and defended nullification against all the famous orators who crowded to assail it.

The President called on Congress to provide the means to enforce the law, and a so-called force bill was introduced. The Carolinians were defiant, and the country seemed on the verge of civil war; but Clay, by the second of his famous compromises, avoided the struggle. A new tariff law, providing for a gradual reduction of duties, was passed along with the force bill. The Carolinians chose the olive branch instead of the sword. The nullifiers first postponed and then repealed their ordinance.

Jackson was a national hero as he had never been before. In the summer of 1833, he made a journey to the Northeast, and even New England made him welcome. Harvard College made him a Doctor of Laws. As he rode through the streets of Boston, a merchant of Federalist traditions, who had closed his windows to show his principles, peeped through, and Jackson's bearing so touched him that he sent a child to wave the old gentleman a handkerchief. Andy of the Waxhaws was at the summit of his career. No other American could rival him in popularity; no other American had ever had such power over his countrymen since Washington frowned at the whisper that he might be a king.

But the great man was only a man, after all. He was in wretched health throughout his first term, and at times it did not seem that he could possibly live through it. His old wounds troubled him, and one day he laid bare his shoulder, gripped his cane with his free hand, and a surgeon cut out the ball from Jesse Benton's pistol. He was too ill to finish his New England tour, and hastened back to Washington.

But his opponents had little reason to rejoice in his illness. The summer was not spent before he had made up his mind to do the most daring act of his public life. He had vetoed the Bank's new charter, but the Bank itself was not destroyed. The public funds were still in its keeping; its power in the business world was as great as ever. He believed, moreover, that Biddle was using money freely to fight him, and would sooner or later get what he wanted from Congress. He prepared, therefore, to crush the Bank by withdrawing the deposits of public money and giving them into the keeping of other banks throughout the country. Blair, in "The Globe," set to work to convince the people that the Bank was not sound, and that the public funds were unsafe. Kendall was sent about the country to examine other banks. Congress voted against removing the deposits, but the old charter authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to do it, and the Secretary of the Treasury was now William Duane, of Philadelphia, a son of Jackson's early friend. There had been some changes in the cabinet after the second inauguration, Livingston had been appointed minister to France, the Secretary of the Treasury transferred to the State Department, and Duane called to the Treasury.

But Duane would not fall in with the President's plan. He did not believe the deposits were in danger, and refused to sign an order for removal. Jackson argued, then grew angry, and finally dismissed him. Duane defended his course ably. Lewis also advised against removal. Benton favored it, but in this he was almost alone among the leading public men. Jackson, however, was started, and he could not be stopped. Roger B. Taney, of Maryland, the Attorney-General, was made Secretary of the Treasury, and on September 26, 1833, three days after Duane's dismissal, the order was signed and a series of changes began that did not end until the whole financial system of the country was changed.

When Congress met, it proved to be, everything considered, probably the ablest legislature ever assembled in America. There were brilliant men of a new generation in the lower House, and Adams also was there. In the Senate, the great three were still supreme, and were now united against the President. The debates were long and furious. A panic throughout the country added to the excitement. Clay led the attack, Calhoun and Webster supported it; Benton bore the brunt of it. In the House, the Jackson men had a majority; in the Senate, the opposition. The Senate refused to confirm the nomination of Taney to be Secretary of the Treasury, and voted that the President had taken upon himself powers not given by the Constitution. The President sent in a fiery remonstrance, and the Senate voted not to receive it. Benton at once moved that the resolution of censure be expunged from the record, and declared he would keep that motion before the Senate until the people, by choosing a Jackson majority of Senators, should force it through.

The session closed with nothing done for the Bank, and nothing ever was done for it. When its charter expired in 1836, it got another from Pennsylvania, and kept going for some years. But Jackson had given it a deathblow. It fell into dangerous financial practices, failed, started again, failed a second time, staggered to its feet once more, and then went down in utter ruin and disgrace.

Its ruin was not accomplished without great disturbance to financial conditions. The country had been prosperous a long time. Money had been plentiful. Speculation had been the order of the day. The "pet banks," chosen to be the depositories of the government money, were badly managed. The surplus, distributed among the States, strengthened the impulse to wild speculation. Paper money was too plentiful. A dangerous financial condition prevailed, into whose causes and consequences we cannot here inquire. That and many other aspects of Jackson's administration can be satisfactorily treated only at considerable length. Jackson himself attributed all the trouble to Biddle and Clay; Biddle, he declared, was trying to ruin the country for revenge. The President even suspected Clay of setting on an insane person who attempted his life. He took no measures of a nature to restore health to business until near the end of his term. Then, acting as usual on his own responsibility, he issued a circular commonly called the "Specie Circular," requiring payments for public lands, which had formerly been made in bank paper, to be made in coin. That was like the thunderclap which precedes the storm: but the storm broke on his successor, not on him.

For a time it seemed as if he might also bequeath to his successor a foreign war. France had agreed to pay the spoliation claims, but the French Chambers failed to appropriate the money. Louis Philippe, the king, suggested to Livingston, the American Minister, that a stronger tone from the United States might stir the Chambers to action. Jackson was the last man in the world to hurt a cause by taking too mild a tone. In his message of 1834 to Congress, he took a tone so strong that it made the French Chambers too angry to pay. Thereupon, he suggested reprisals. The House, led by Adams, who never fell behind Jackson on a question of foreign relations, sustained the President. The Senate took no action. The French Chambers finally passed an appropriation, but with a proviso that no money should be paid until satisfactory explanations of the President's message were received. Jackson had no notion of apologizing, and feeling was rising in both countries. Diplomatic relations were broken off, and war was apparently very close, when, in the winter of 1835-6, England offered to mediate. An expression in Jackson's message of 1835, not meant as an apology, was somehow construed as such by the French ministry, and France agreed to pay.

The final settlement came at the very end of Jackson's administration. The presidential election of 1836 had fulfilled his wish that Van Buren should be his successor. In January, 1837, the resolution of censure was solemnly expunged from the records of the Senate. That body being now controlled by his friends, and his enemy, John Marshall, being dead, he named Taney Chief Justice, and the nomination was confirmed. He issued a farewell address to the people, after the manner of Washington, and stood, a white-haired, impressive figure, to watch the inauguration of Van Buren; then he journeyed home to The Hermitage to receive his last glorious welcome from his neighbors.

It was the most triumphant home-coming of them all. He had beaten all his enemies. Clay, wearied out with politics, was again in retirement; Adams, whom he found a President, was leading a minority of representatives in a new sectional struggle, the fight against slavery; Calhoun, whom he found but one step from the presidency, was a gloomy and tragical figure, the Ishmael of American politics. As for his friends, he left them in power everywhere,—in congress, on the bench, in the White House. To friends and enemies he had been like fate.

There was left for him a peaceful old age, and a calm and happy deathbed. Neighbors, political associates, old comrades, famous foreigners, visited The Hermitage to see the man who had played so great a part in history. Like Jefferson at Monticello, he guided with his counsel the party he had led. The long struggle over slavery was now begun, and soon the annexation of Texas took the first place among public questions. The old man had encouraged Houston to go to Texas, and had done all he could, and more than any other President would have dared, to forward the movement for independence. Now that Texas was ready to come into the Union, he heartily favored annexation. In 1844, Clay and Polk were candidates for the presidency, and Jackson's influence, still a power, was freely exerted for Polk and annexation. It was as if Clay, now an old man also, were once more about to lift the cup to his lips, and the relentless hand of Andrew Jackson dashed it to the ground.

Yet Andrew Jackson declared before he died that he forgave all his enemies. He had promised his wife, whose picture he wore in a great locket next his heart, whose Bible he read every day at the White House, that when he should be free of politics he would join himself to the church; if, he said, he made a profession while he was still before the people, his enemies would accuse him of hypocrisy. He kept his word. Trembling and weeping, he stood before the altar in the tiny church he had built for her and took the vows of a Christian. It had been hard for him to say that he forgave his enemies; hardest of all, to say that he forgave those who had attacked him while he was serving his country in the field. But after a long pause he told the minister he thought he could forgive even them.

June 8, 1845, in his seventy-ninth year, he died. His last words to those about him bade them meet him in heaven.

* * * * *

What is the rightful place in history of the fiery horseman in front of the White House? The reader must answer for himself when he has studied for himself all the great questions Jackson dealt with. Such a study will surely show that he made many mistakes, did much injustice to men, espoused many causes without waiting to hear the other side, was often bitter, violent, even cruel. It will show how ignorant he was on many subjects, how prejudiced on others. It will show him in contact with men who surpassed him in wisdom, in knowledge, in fairness of mind. It will deny him a place among those calm, just great men who can see both sides and yet strive ardently for the right side.

But the longest inquiry will not discover another American of his times who had in such ample measure the gifts of courage and will. Many had fewer faults, many superior talents, but none so great a spirit. He was the man who had his way. He was the American whose simple virtues his countrymen most clearly understood, whose trespasses they most readily forgave; and until Americans are altogether changed, many, like the Democrats of the 'Twenties and 'Thirties, will still "vote for Jackson,"—for the poor boy who fought his way, step by step, to the highest station; for the soldier who always went to meet the enemy at the gate; for the President who never shirked a responsibility; for the man who would not think evil of a woman or speak harshly to a child. Education, and training in statecraft, would have saved him many errors; culture might have softened the fierceness of his nature. But untrained, uncultivated, imperfect as he was, not one of his great contemporaries had so good a right to stand for American character.

THE END