Republished by Tale Wins For:The BrowzerBooks Book Club

in the year 2012 CE.

Edited From The BookANDREW JACKSON

BYWILLIAM GARROTT BROWN

When Andrew Jackson, "Old Hickory," died, someone asked,"Will he go to Heaven?"

and the answer was,

"He will if He wants to."

Andrew Jackson could easily earn the title of “America's Most Passionate Man”. He had admirers, and he had enemies; Sam Houston worshiped him, David Crockett hated the ground he stood on. Andrew Jackson hated debt, and he admired women.When he said: “Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.” He meant exactly that, and every word of it. Not even the Governor of Tennessee could speak a slighting word against her and escape the consequences.

Andrew Jackson... The man, the myth, the mystery and the maybe, William Garrott Brown has struck a solid chord of equity that resonates with truth in this biography.This is a BrowzerBooks Book Club Edition Published in the year of 2010 C.E.

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Section 1

THE WAXHAWS AND THE WILDERNESS

In Lafayette Square, which fronts the White House at Washington, there is an equestrian statue of a very thin, long-headed old man whose most striking physical characteristics are the firm chin and lips and the bristling, upright hair. The piece is not a great work of art, but it gives one a strong impression of determination, if not of pugnacity. Sculptors have not the means to represent the human eye, else this impression might have been made stronger; for the old gentleman whose warlike aspect is here reproduced had a glance like a hawk's. He had, moreover, a habit of gazing fixedly at any one who attracted his attention. When he was angry, as he was quite frequently, few men could meet his look with composure. When he was in good humor, however, as he usually was when he dealt with his friends, or with women or children, his eyes could be very kindly, and his grim lips could part in a smile that was extremely attractive.Not far away is the Treasury building. Were the horseman alive, by merely turning his head he could see its outline through the trees. There is a tradition in Washington that when this old man lived in the White House, and Congress voted to erect a new Treasury building, the old one being burned, there was some question of the exact spot on which it should stand. The question was put to him when he happened to be walking near the western end of Pennsylvania Avenue. He struck his cane on the ground and said shortly, "Put it here, sir,"—and there it stands.Whether or not the story is true, it is characteristic of the man and in keeping with the history of his times; for when Andrew Jackson was President most things were done at Washington just as he ordered them to be done.His friends declared that this was so because in most things his will stood for the will of the American people; his enemies, that they were done for no good reason whatever, but only because a despot commanded his slaves to do them.

To this day there is the same division of opinion. The historians still fight the same battle over him and his doings which in former times was fought out by famous orators in Congress, by the whole people at the polls. It is doubtful, indeed, if there ever will be, until the end of the Republic itself, an end of the dispute over the place which that slender figure with the bristling hair ought to have in American history. Had Andrew Jackson any good claim to statues and monuments, to the first place in the Republic, to popularity such as no other man had enjoyed since Washington, to power such as Washington himself had never exercised?Did he prove himself worthy of the place and power he held? To answer either yes or no with assurance one must patiently examine more books than Andrew Jackson ever glanced through in his whole life. This little book would hardly contain the full titles of them all. Yet it may perhaps be large enough to let the reader see what manner of man he was concerning whom so many bitter controversies have raged. Perhaps it may serve to explain how a Scotch-Irish boy, born to the deepest obscurity and the wretchedest poverty, and blessed, apparently, with no remarkable gifts of mind or body, came to have statues carved in his honor, towns and counties and cities named for him, long books written about him, a great party organized to do his bidding, the whole country time and again divided into those who were for him and those who were against him.It is quite important, as Mr. Parton, the most painstaking of all his biographers, often observes, that this particular poor boy was of Scotch-Irish stock. That stock is again and again conspicuous in American history, and Andrew Jackson was in many respects the most thoroughly representative Scotch-Irishman of all the notable Americans who can trace their descent to the North of Ireland. Indeed, it may be said that he narrowly escaped being born in the North of Ireland, for his parents were living at Carrickfergus until two years before his birth.They landed in America in 1765, and made their home in a ScotchIrish settlement, the Waxhaws, on the boundary line between the two Carolinas. Andrew Jackson, the father, and Elizabeth Hutchinson, the mother, were married and had two sons before they left Carrickfergus. They were poor, and doubtless came to America for no other reason than to better their fortunes.

They were still very poor when, in the early spring of the year 1767, the husband died. A few days later, March 15, a son was born to the widowed Elizabeth, and she named him Andrew. He himself in after years said that his birthplace was to the south of the state line, and called South Carolina his native State; but Mr. Parton's industrious researches make it seem more probable that the small log-house in which he was born was north of the line, in Union County, North Carolina.The question is of less importance than the fact, of which there is no question, that he was born to the humblest circumstances in a new settlement of a new country, and that his childhood and boyhood were passed among people of little culture, whose lives were hard and bare. The boy got little education, and never was a scholar. “Only knowing one way to spell a word is the sign of a feeble mind.”To the day of his death, he wrote the English language with difficulty, making many errors of grammar and spelling, and spoke it with many peculiarities of pronunciation. Of other languages he knew nothing; of the great body of science, literature, and the arts he knew next to nothing. In fact, he probably got less from books than any other famous man in American history.Little is authentically known of his early years. It is clear, however, that he was a mischievous, high-spirited boy, and often got into trouble. At least one anecdote is thoroughly in keeping with his career in manhood. Some of his playmates, so the story goes, once loaded a gun to the muzzle and gave it him to fire. As they expected, it kicked him over, but they missed the fun they looked for. He sprang to his feet white with rage, and exclaimed, with an oath, "If one of you laughs, I'll kill him!"—and no one laughed.The oath itself is not an unimportant part of the story, for it may as well be said at once that Andrew Jackson, until near the end of his life, had many such vices as swearing. He not only swore, but he frequently quarreled and fought; he was at one time given to betting, particularly on horses; he drank, and he used tobacco constantly. All of these habits were common in the society to which he was born, and he did not escape them. But some things he did escape. He hated debt all his life, and was willing to do almost anything rather than incur it. He had the greatest reverence for women, and bore himself towards them with a courtesy and tenderness, a knightly purity of

thought and word and deed, which the finest gentleman of the most ancient society in the world could not have surpassed.When this pleasing fact is stated, one's thoughts turn naturally to his widowed mother, as to the most natural source of such an excellence in the son. All we know of her does indeed indicate that her influence on him was both strong and good: but we know very little. She was a simple, uncultivated person, like most of her neighbors, but her conduct during the harrowing scenes of the revolutionary war makes us think she was in some respects extraordinary.The struggle was nowhere rougher and fiercer than it was in the Carolinas. The notorious Colonel Tarleton operated in the Waxhaws neighborhood, and many dreadful stories of suffering and cruelty belong to that country and that time. The Jackson family had their full share of the fighting and the suffering. The two older boys, Hugh and Robert, enlisted. Young "Andy" himself, when he was barely in his teens, carried a musket. He and Robert were captured, and were released through the efforts of their mother, who brought about an exchange of prisoners. Soon afterwards, she went on a long and heroic journey to Charleston to nurse the sick Americans confined on the British prison ships there; and there she fell ill of the ship fever and died. Hugh and Robert both died in the service.Andrew was thus left an orphan, weakened in body by the smallpox, which he took while he was in prison. Moreover, he bore on his head the mark of a blow from the sword of a British officer whose boots he had refused to polish. No man ever lived who had a simpler human way of loving those who befriended him and of hating those who hurt him than Andrew Jackson; and surely few men ever had better excuse than he for hating the British uniform. His feeling against the British was one of the things that colored his opinions on public questions; the supreme hour of his life was the hour when, at New Orleans, he had his revenge—full measure, heaped up, and running over—for all that he had suffered in the Waxhaws. Scholarly historians, passing rapidly over the events of his childhood, give many pages of learned criticism to the course he took on great public questions in later years, and gravely deplore the terrible passions that swayed him when, no doubt, he should have been as deliberate and calm as they are while they review his stormy life. But for those who would rather understand than judge him it surely cannot seem a small thing that

he started out in life with such a heritage of bitter memories, such a schooling in hatred, as few children were ever cursed with. Passion and revenge are wrong, of course, but the sandy-haired, pockmarked lad of the Waxhaws had better excuse than most boys for failing to learn that lesson. It is doubtful, indeed, if any one ever took the trouble to teach it him. One little thing that stuck in his mind probably hurt worse than the sabre cut on his head. He did not even know where his mother's grave was.It does not appear that during the next seven years, while he was growing to manhood, he gave himself with much industry either to study or to work. For six months he was employed in the shop of a saddler, but he seems to have learned more about filling saddles than about making them, for he became somewhat famous as a horseman even in a country where the love of horseflesh was universal. He got acquainted with some wealthy people from Charleston who were exiled until the British evacuated their city, and lived with them a sporting life which was beyond his means. After the peace he made a visit to Charleston, got into debt, got out of it by winning a wager, and grew somewhat graver in consequence of his experience. There is even some reason to believe that he went to work as a schoolmaster; and doubtless some backwoods schools of that period had masters as ignorant as Andrew Jackson. Finally, he resolved to study law, and in the winter of - started out to find an office in which he might prepare himself for his profession. He found a place in the office of Mr. Spruce McCay, of Salisbury, North Carolina, an old-fashioned Southern town, where he made his home until 1788, when he was admitted to the bar. All that is known of his life at Salisbury accords with what is known of his life at the Waxhaws. He was ready for a frolic or a fight at any hour of the day or night; he excelled in such sports as required swiftness and nerve; he was fond of practical jokes; he was not over fond of study, and never acquired any great knowledge of the law. At twenty, when his studies were finished, he is described as a tall, slender young fellow, with a thin, fair face and deep blue eyes, by no means handsome, but distinguished by considerable grace and dignity of manner; an exquisite rider and a capital shot; of an extraordinarily passionate temper, yet singularly swift, even when his anger was at white heat, to seize upon the right means to protect himself or

discomfit an adversary; already somewhat of a leader, not by any eminence of talent or knowledge, but because he had a gift of leadership and was always intensely minded to have his way. In 1784, the year of his admission to the bar, after a brief stay at Martinsville, a small North Carolina town, he got himself appointed solicitor, or public prosecutor, of the western district of Tennessee, and soon set out for the West.The appointment of so young a man to such an office seems remarkable until one knows what Tennessee was like at that time, and what duties a solicitor was expected to discharge. The term Tennessee is, in fact, misleading. The region to which Jackson went still belonged to North Carolina, though its inhabitants had but a little while before made an attempt to set up a separate State under the name of Franklin. But of those who made the attempt the great majority had lived in that part of North Carolina's western lands which is now East Tennessee—a mountainous region of which Jonesboro, a squatter town of fifty or sixty log-houses, was the metropolis. Nashville, whither Jackson was bound, was nearly two hundred miles west of Jonesboro, and the Nashville settlement was as yet less than ten years old. It was founded in by Captain James Robertson with a little company of nine. The next year Colonel John Donelson, with a much larger party, including women and children, came from Virginia to join his friend Robertson. His journey was one of the most striking incidents in the peopling of the West, for it was made in flatboats which passed down the Holston into the Tennessee, down the Tennessee into the Ohio, up the Ohio into the Cumberland, and up the Cumberland to Nashville. It took four months to cover the two thousand miles or more, and there were bloody fights with Indians, sickness, and death by the way. When, eight years later, after an overland journey through a wilderness still almost unbroken and still infested with Indians, Jackson came to Nashville, he found Mrs. Donelson a widow, for her husband had been murdered; and he soon became an inmate of her home.It was well for a widow in that wild country if she could procure men "boarders," even though she might not need to "take boarders" for a living; for every household needed men to protect it from the Indians. Immigration was increasing constantly, but the white population was

still far too small to be safe. Within seven miles of Nashville, during the years 1780-1794, the Indians killed, on an average, one white person every ten days.Life in such a country was even rougher and barer than in the Waxhaws. The houses were chiefly cabins made of unhewn logs, and the things which in older communities make the inside of houses attractive were almost wholly wanting. Such merchandise as was offered to the settlers had to be fetched hundreds of miles,—usually from Philadelphia,—and grew very dear by the time it reached them. For food, clothing, and shelter each family relied mainly on the handiwork of its own members. As in all frontier regions, the population was chiefly male. The brave women who took their share of the common work and hardship were treated with much respect, and did their part well, no doubt, but they had little leisure for those arts which brighten the lives and refine the characters of husbands and children.Manners suited conditions. These builders of the West had more strength than gentleness, more shrewdness than wisdom, more courage than culture. They were the rough front which American civilization presented to the wilderness and the savage,—brave, hardhanded, themselves somewhat affected with the barbarism they came to displace, yet true representatives of their masterful race in all essentials of character. They were mainly of English or Scotch-Irish stock; and no other breeds of white men have ever shown such capacity as these two for dealing with inferior races and new countries. Their virtues were courage, inventiveness, energy, alertness, generosity, honesty, truth-speaking; their commonest faults were violence, combativeness, lax ways in business, intemperance, narrow mind mindedness. They hated foreigners and they hated Indians. They were ever ready to fight any one who behaved like an enemy or a critic; they held in honor women, their country, and brave men. Shut off from the greater world to the eastward, and having few pleasures such as most Americans may now enjoy, they filled their leisure hours with such sports as hunting, horse-racing, drinking bouts, fights, and – of course – lawsuits.The law, indeed, they held in great reverence; that race mark they had in common with all other societies made up of Englishmen and Americans of English descent. But they were even fonder of fighting

than of the law, and the particular laws which were at once hardest to enforce and most in need of enforcement were those very simple laws which set forth the principle that private wrongs must be righted in the courts, which stand for the peace of the State, and not by the "wild justice" of revenge.The difficult and dangerous work of keeping order and of enforcing business obligations fell largely to the "solicitor;" and it is no wonder that there was no great scramble for the office. And so it came to pass that a very young man, with no experience at the bar and little knowledge of the law, seized the appointment, and enjoyed it. His duties were simple enough, and he had no reason to complain of being left in idleness. The court records of the period show a picturesque assortment of assaults, street-fights, pistollings, gougings, and the like.The majesty of the law had need of a vigorous prosecutor rather than a learned representative; and the representative had need of other weapons than those supplied by the law books if he meant to make his authority respected and yet keep a whole skin wrapped around his body. If he proved weak and timid, the prosecutor was sure to be despised; if determined and relentless, he was sure to make enemies; if incautious and unwary, he would probably get himself shot.According to all accounts, he was successful from the first in his trying work, and his success in that brought him other work as a lawyer and a rapid rise to prominence in the community. He became well acquainted, for his work required much traveling about. He learned the country itself. On his long journeys he was frequently in danger from the Indians, and learned their ways and how to cope with them. Sometimes he slept alone in the woods, or even lay all night awake, his hand on his rifle. It is doubtful, however, if any better man than young Andrew Jackson could have been found for the place, and that is almost the same thing as saying that no better place could have been found for him. To the office and his new surroundings he brought the qualities they supremely demanded,—a will that no man ever subdued, a desperate courage which not even the Tennesseans could match, and a swift, intuitive perception of how to act in emergencies.

Whether he dealt with Indians who beset his pathway through the wilderness, or white men who would not let the law take its course, it is not on record that he ever turned aside from his purpose. In ten years he was the possessor of a considerable estate, chiefly in land. And he had not accumulated property by neglecting his duties as solicitor. When certain intruders on Indian lands were giving trouble, Governor Blount said: "Let the district attorney, Mr. Jackson, be informed. He will be certain to do his duty, and the offenders will be punished."But neither did the district attorney escape the consequences of his firmness and courage. He had so many "difficulties" that even in that country he soon got a reputation for readiness to fight. A mass of anecdote and tradition about his early quarrels has come down to us. Some of these affairs seem to have been undignified and rather ludicrous scuffles: in one of them Jackson overcame a giant antagonist by poking him with the point of a fence rail. Other quarrels followed the dignified procedure of the duello. They were all subject to the condemnation which our gentler civilization pronounces on violence as a means of ending disputes, but no doubt they helped the young lawyer into the prominence he had won by the time Tennessee was ready to become a State.The most important event of this early period of Jackson's life was his marriage. It was first solemnized early in 1791, and a second time in January, 1794. The second ceremony was due to the painful discovery that at the time of the first his wife was not fully released from a former marriage. She was Rachel, daughter of John Donelson, the pioneer, and when Jackson first came to Tennessee she was already married to one Lewis Robards. Robards was a jealous husband. He made charges against his wife concerning several men, and finally concerning Jackson, although the facts that have come down to us and the opinions of those who knew most about the affair all go to show that Jackson acted as a chivalrous protector of a distressed woman, and never knowingly committed any offence against his accuser's home.Robards and Rachel Donelson had been married in Kentucky, then a part of Virginia, and Virginia had no law of divorce. In the Virginia legislature, acting on a petition of Robards, authorized the supreme court of Kentucky to try the case and grant him a divorce if it should

find his charges against his wife and Jackson to be true. Somehow, Jackson and Mrs. Robards were persuaded that this act of the Virginia legislature was itself a divorce, and so they were married. In 1793, however, Robards brought suit before the Kentucky court, and the court, finding on the facts as they then existed, when the accused couple were living together as man and wife, granted the decree. In order, therefore, to make sure of a legal marriage, Jackson had the ceremony repeated.It was a most unfortunate situation for an honest man and an honest woman, and saddened a union which was otherwise pure and beautiful; for to the day of her death Jackson and his wife loved each other most tenderly. It brought into his life a new element of bitterness and passion. Whoever, by the slightest hint, referred to the irregularity of his marriage, became his mortal enemy. For such he kept his pistols always ready, and more than one incautious man found to his cost what it meant to breathe a word on that forbidden subject. One such man was Governor of Tennessee when the trouble with Jackson occurred.The painful facts of his marriage, and the criticism of his wife, had another effect on Jackson which in time became important to the whole country. Through that experience his chivalrous feeling for women was developed into a quixotic readiness to be the champion of any woman whom he found distressed or slandered.Section IICONGRESS: THE BENCH: THE MILITIAIn 1793 Jackson took his seat as a member of the convention called to frame a constitution for the State of Tennessee. He thus entered on a brief career of public service, in the course of which he held three important offices. In the autumn of 1796 he was chosen to be Tennessee's first representative in Congress. A year later he was appointed United States Senator, and held the office until he resigned in April, 1798. From 1798 until 1804, he was a justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.These were all high places for so young a man, and one naturally expects his biographer to linger for many pages over his course while he held them. The fact that he held them is indeed important, for it shows how strongly he had established himself in Tennessee. But very little need be said of what he did while he held them.

Indeed, it is amazing how little can be said. In the convention he served on the committee to draft the constitution and took a somewhat prominent part in the debates, and there is also a tradition that he suggested the name of the State; but no notable feature of the constitution is clearly due to him. It might, however, have been due to the presence in the convention of such fiery spirits as he that it adopted a rule of order which throws into comical prominence the warlike character of early Tennesseans. Rule declared: "He that digresseth from the subject to fall on the person of any member shall be suppressed by the Speaker."The scant record of Jackson's services in the House of Representatives and in the Senate is of little importance to us save in three respects. It throws some light on his political opinions at that period; it gives us a glimpse of him as he appeared against the background of the most elegant society then existing in America, for Congress was sitting in Philadelphia, which had sixty-five thousand inhabitants; and it led to one or two friendships which had an important bearing on his later career.His opinions, however, were not expressed in speeches. He addressed the House but twice, both times on a resolution for paying troops whom General Sevier had led against the Indians without any order from the national government. The resolution passed, and added to Jackson's popularity at home. In the Senate it is not on record that he ever spoke at all. Many years afterwards, Thomas Jefferson, who was Vice-President in 1797-1798, gave to Daniel Webster a rather curious explanation of the Tennessee Senator's silence. The accuracy of Webster's report of his famous interview with Jefferson at Monticello in 1824 has been questioned, but if it is correct, this is what Jefferson said of Jackson: "His passions are terrible. When I was president of the Senate, he was Senator, and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage."His votes, however, and a few letters show clearly enough where he stood on the questions of the day. Parties were hardly yet formed under the Constitution, but in the strife between the followers of Hamilton, who went for a strong national government, and who became the Federalist party, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the followers of Jefferson, who went for the rights of the States

and distrusted a strong national government, and who became the Republican party, he sided with Jefferson. Indeed, he belonged to the extreme faction of the Republicans, to which the term "Democrats" was applied, at first as a reproach.He favored the French, who were at war with England, and opposed the treaty with England which John Jay had just negotiated. He even went so far as to vote, with eleven others, against the address presented to President Washington after his final speech to Congress. The address was mainly given over to thanks for Washington's great services to his country and to praise of his administration. The handful that opposed it showed at least courage. One of them, Edward Livingston, of New York, afterwards defended himself by drawing a distinction between Washington and his administration. At that time the partisans of France were very bitter over the firm course Washington took to keep the country out of the European contest, and over the treaty with England.Livingston was one of the men with whom Jackson at this time formed a lasting friendship. He was an accomplished gentleman, a very able lawyer, and an advanced Republican. Another was William Duane, Jefferson's friend, the editor of "The Aurora," a newspaper which helped to build up the Republican party. A third was Aaron Burr, who then stood very high among the Republican leaders, and who excelled all other public men in charm of manner.Another leading Republican of the time, Albert Gallatin, recalled Jackson afterwards as "a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face, and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment that of a rough backwoodsman." Taking this with Jefferson's description of him, it seems clear that he made no strong impression at Philadelphia, and found himself out of place in the national legislature. Who, then, would have dreamed that the accomplished Livingston should win his highest fame by preparing a state paper for this unlettered person's signature; that this rough backwoodsman should alone of all Americans surpass the polished Burr in the charm of his manners; that Duane's little son should one day be called by his father's unpromising acquaintance to a place such as even Jefferson's friendship never conferred upon Duane himself. Of all who knew Jackson in Washington, Burr seems to have had the strongest hopes

for his future.Scant as are the traces of his labors as a legislator, even scanter are the records of his career on the bench during the six years that followed. The reports of the decisions of the Tennessee Supreme Court in this period are extremely meagre; not one decision is preserved as Jackson's. But the stories told of Judge Jackson, like the stories told of the solicitor, the general, the president, are legion. One must suffice. A gigantic blacksmith named Bean had committed a crime and the sheriff dared not arrest him. "Summon me," said the judge, and himself walked down from the bench, found the criminal, and arrested him. It was while he was judge that his quarrel with John Sevier, who was again governor in 1803, came finally to a head. Two years before, the two men had been rivals for the office of majorgeneral in the militia, and by a single vote Jackson had won, so that he was both general and judge when he and the governor met in what seemed likely to prove a fatal combat. However, neither was killed, and the quarrel was patched up. In 1804 Judge Jackson resigned. He had not yet found his true place in the public service. But he kept his commission in the militia, and those who like to magnify the work of chance may argue that the single vote by which he got that office determined his career.But he had years to live before it was made plain to him what his career should be; and during those years, from 1804 to 1813, his energies were given chiefly to planting and business. His affairs had become somewhat involved while he was a judge, and to restore his fortunes he entered into trade and set up a store. In this and other enterprises a stalwart Tennessean named John Coffee was his partner, and between the two there grew a bond of friendship which lasted until death broke it. Jackson had considerable shrewdness in trade, and his reputation for paying his debts promptly was of great value, but he had more success in planting and stock-raising than in any other money-making enterprise. His judgment of horses was exceptionally good. From his famous stallion, Truxton, a great racer in his day, many Tennessee thoroughbreds of the present time are descended. Horse-racing was Jackson's favorite sport, and was a source of profit also. In 1805 he first occupied the estate which became so well known as "The Hermitage," where he built a blockhouse of three rooms; the mansion so often displayed in pictures was not built until 1819. In the log-house, however, no less than in

the mansion which was to follow, he offered to guests of high and low degree a hospitality which would have been extraordinary outside of the Southern States.Probably his planter life had some effect on his manners, and helped him to acquire that mingling of cordiality and distinction which in those days gave a peculiar charm to the gentlemen of the South.Even in his quarrels, violent, passionate, and wilful as he was, he usually bore himself in a way to make a deep impression on the impressionable people among whom he lived. Unfortunately, his quarrels did not grow fewer as he grew older, for he never learned the difference between mere opposition to his will, which might be conscientious and honest, and personal enmity to himself. Like most men of that region and time, he carried his personal feelings, his likes and dislikes, into all the affairs of life. In 1803-4, when he wished to be governor of Orleans Territory, the Tennessee congressmen urged President Jefferson to appoint him, but he was represented to the President as "a man of violent passions, arbitrary in his disposition, and frequently engaged in broils and disputes."The most celebrated and perhaps the worst of all his quarrels was that with Charles Dickinson, a young man of prominence, a duellist, and a marvellous shot.It was a long quarrel, beginning, apparently, over a projected race between Truxton and Plow Bay, a horse in which Dickinson was interested. Other persons were involved before the quarrel ended. General Jackson publicly caned one Thomas Swann who had contrived to get himself mixed up in the affair. Coffee, acting as Jackson's friend, had a duel with one McNairy, and was severely wounded. Finally, for no sufficient cause which the printed accounts discover, Jackson and Dickinson met in Kentucky, each bent on killing his man. The word being given, Dickinson fired quickly, and with perfect aim; a puff of dust flew up from the breast of Jackson's coat. But he kept his feet, drew his left arm across his breast, slowly raised his pistol, and pulled the trigger. The hammer stopped at the half-cock. He cocked it again, aimed deliberately, fired, and killed his man. His own life he owed to the thinness of his body, for Dickinson had hit the spot where he thought his adversary's heart was beating. Jackson had purposely allowed the other to fire first, expecting to be hit, and fearing that if he, too, fired hurriedly, the shock would spoil his aim.

"I should have hit him," he said afterwards, "had he shot me through the brain." It is supposed that his hatred of Dickinson was really due, not to the confused dispute over the race, but to something Dickinson had said in his cups about Mrs. Jackson.Whatever the provocation, the bloody story is revolting enough; but the picture of Jackson's grim, erect figure, his hawklike eyes terrible with hatred, the ball in his breast, the pistol in his hand, must take its place alongside those other pictures and statues of him which all Americans know.But if Jackson was a terrible enemy, he was also the most faithful of friends. Many men feared and hated him; many also loved him, and he himself would go as far to help a friend as to crush an enemy. One of his friends was a certain Patten Anderson, who seems always to have been getting into trouble, but whom the general never deserted. Once Anderson got into a fight at one end of a long table where a public dinner was being served, and was in great danger until Jackson, who sat at the other end, noticed the scuffle. "I'm coming, Patten," he cried, and promptly leaped on the table and strode through dinner to the rescue. Anderson was killed at last, and Jackson was a witness at the trial of his slayer. He was asked if the unfortunate Anderson was not given in his lifetime to quarrelling."Sir," said Jackson, "my friend, Patten Anderson, was a natural enemy to scoundrels."His friendship for Aaron Burr came very near involving him in serious difficulties. In 1805, when Burr was on his first visit to the Southwest, he went to Nashville, and was entertained most cordially at The Hermitage. He was there again on his return, and made with his host a contract for boats and supplies to be used in that mysterious enterprise which has so puzzled American historians.Burr declared he had no designs hostile to the United States, and Jackson believed him. When, a year later, the whole country was in a sort of panic over Burr's suspected treason, Jackson offered to President Jefferson the services of the militia under his command, and promptly took measures to thwart any treasonable movement that might be afoot in the West; but he was soon convinced that Burr was suspected unjustly, and never for a moment deserted him in his trouble. He went to Richmond to testify at his trial, and while there made a public speech full of bitterness against those who, as he

thought, were persecuting his friend. He himself was at first strongly suspected of complicity in Burr's project, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that Andrew Jackson ever in his life looked upon an enemy of his country otherwise than as his own mortal foe. His faults were many, but he loved his country simply, and with all his heart.It seems clear, however, that Jackson, and in fact the whole Southwest, sympathized very strongly with the design which many in that quarter at first thought Burr to entertain; the design, namely, of seizing West Florida or Texas, or perhaps both. The United States were at that time, as they were before and after, very close to war with Spain. Spain still had possession of the Floridas, although the United States claimed that West Florida, extending along the Gulf coast from the Perdido River to the "Island of New Orleans," was included in the Louisiana purchase. To drive the Spaniards out of West Florida was an ardent desire of Jackson's. Ten years before, when the Eastern States had shown little interest in the development of the Southwest, and had seemed to prefer commercial privileges with the Spanish colonies to the free navigation of the Mississippi, which the Western country needed for its development, Spanish agents had endeavored to stir up disaffection in the Southwest, looking to the separation of that region from the Union. At that time, many people in the East, knowing little of the Westerners, had suspected them of lending an ear to Spain's tempting whispers. That was one reason why such a panic arose over Burr, for he had always been a champion of the Southwest, and the pioneers liked him. After the failure and disgrace of Burr the stage was cleared for another leader in the southwestward movement. And who so likely to take the rôle as the patriotic and warlike general of the Tennessee militia?Jackson had a chance to play that rôle in a small way when Silas Dinsmore, the United States agent among the Choctaws, whose lands lay in Mississippi Territory, refused to allow persons to pass through the Choctaw country with negroes unless they showed passports for the negroes. Dinsmore had a law of Congress behind him, but a treaty between the United States and the Choctaws provided for a road through the Choctaw country which should be "a highway for citizens of the United States and the Choctaws." Jackson, passing along the road with some slaves, dared the agent to interfere. He also exerted himself to bring about the removal of Dinsmore, and, as his wont was, made a personal matter of the dispute. His feeling was so

strong that years afterwards, when Dinsmore, happening to meet him, made a courteous advance, the general sternly repelled it.The quarrel with Dinsmore occurred in 1812. Andrew Jackson was then forty-five years old. He was well known in Tennessee as a successful planter, a breeder and racer of horses, a swearer of mighty oaths, a faithful and generous man to his friends, a chivalrous man to women, a hospitable man at his home, a desperate and relentless man in personal conflicts, a man who always did the thing he set himself to do. But as yet he had never found anything to do that was important enough to bring him before the country at large. Outside of Tennessee, few men had ever heard his name. At Washington he was probably distrusted, so far as he was known at all, because of his championship of Burr and his quarrel with Dinsmore, and because he had been for Monroe instead of Madison for President. He was ardently in favor of war with Great Britain because of the impressment of American seamen and other grievances which the United States had borne for years, but there seemed to be little likelihood of his getting a chance to play a part in the war if it should come. The war was declared in June, 1812. A member of Congress, on his way home after voting for the declaration, had a talk with Aaron Burr, who was now living in retirement in New York. "I know," said Burr, "that my word is not worth much with Madison; but you may tell him from me that there is an unknown man in the West, named Andrew Jackson, who will do credit to a commission in the army."It is said, indeed, that Jackson was twice recommended to President Madison for a commission in the regular army, and twice rejected. Many years later, Thomas H. Benton told in Congress how he himself, who was in 1812 a young lawyer in Nashville and a militia officer under Jackson, found in his mail one morning an act of Congress authorizing the President to accept organized bodies of volunteers. It was a raw day in February, but young Benton at once drew up a plan for offering Jackson's militia command to the government, rode to The Hermitage to find the general, "and came upon him," so Mr. Benton's story goes, "in the twilight, sitting alone before the fire, a lamb and a child between his knees. He started a little, called a servant to remove the two innocents to another room, and explained to me how it was. The child had cried because the lamb was out in the cold, and begged him to bring it in—which he had done to please the

child, his adopted son." That is a far pleasanter picture than the other we saw just now of Jackson the duellist, but this also is a characteristic picture, and should go into the gallery; for Jackson, like many another man who has been denied children of his own, was singularly tender with little folk. It is certainly good to be able to think of him, fierce man that he was, as turning from fondling a child to enter on his soldier's career.Mr. Benton's account of the matter is questioned, but it is certain that Jackson offered his services, with those of 2500 volunteers, immediately after the declaration of war. The government accepted the offer, but left him in idleness until October, 1812, when the governor of Tennessee was asked for volunteers, ostensibly to reinforce General Wilkinson at New Orleans. The governor in turn called upon General Jackson, and he, setting to work with the utmost enthusiasm, issued to the volunteers the first of those eminently Jacksonian addresses wherewith he was wont to hearten his followers. On January 7, 1813, the command set forth, the infantry by river, the cavalry, under John Coffee, by land. By the middle of February all were united at Natchez, Mississippi, where the expedition was halted to await further orders. Week after week passed by, and finally, late in March, to the general's rage and disgust, he heard from the Secretary of War that the causes of the expedition had ceased to exist, and that he was to consider his command "dismissed from the public service"—and not one word as to any provision for getting the men home!Jackson's resolution was instantly taken and firmly carried out. He refused to disband the men at Natchez, and marched them home, pledging his own credit for the necessary expenses. His course commanded the approval of the State and won him the devotion of the men.It was the first of many occasions on which, while acting as a military officer, he dared to do the thing he thought to be right, no matter how irregular it was. On the journey home, his soldierly behavior in trying circumstances won him his famous nickname. The men spoke of him as being "tough as hickory," and so came to call him "Hickory," and finally, with affection, "Old Hickory." Before he reached Nashville he again offered his command for service in Canada, but no reply came. In May, he dismissed it, and it seemed as if he were not going to have any soldier's career at all.

Benton, who had served in the expedition as an aid, went to Washington and with difficulty persuaded the War Department to pay the expenses of the march from Natchez. When he returned to Nashville, it was to find that in a duel between Jesse Benton, his brother, and one Carroll, the general had acted as Carroll's second. A bitter quarrel between Jackson and the Bentons followed; before it ended, Jackson swore "by the Eternal" he would horsewhip Thomas Benton on sight. They met at a Nashville hotel. Jesse Benton was there, and also John Coffee and Stokeley Hays, friends of Jackson's. There was a rough-and-tumble fight. Thomas Benton fell down a stairway; Jesse Benton was stabbed; Jackson was shot in the shoulder and severely wounded. He was put to bed in the old Nashville Inn, a famous hostelry of the time, and while he lay helpless from a wound so ignobly won, the call was on its way which should at last summon him to the work for which he was fittest. He was to pass from an action such as no biographer can defend to deeds which none can fail to praise. Jackson the duellist must give place to Jackson the soldier. Yet all fighting is akin, and it was but a change of scene and purpose that turned the man of the tavern brawl into the man of The Horseshoe and New Orleans; for it happened that there was nowhere in the Southwest, perhaps nowhere in the country, any other man quite so sure to have his way, whether in a street fight or in a battle.------------------------------------------------------------------------------IIITOHOPEKA AND PENSACOLAThe call that now came to Jackson was chiefly due to a very picturesque character of the times: the man who is said to have been the only rival of Burr and Jackson in the impression he made upon all beholders by his manner and bearing. The call came, indeed, from the southward, but probably it would never have come but for the work of Tecumseh (or Tecumthe), the famous Shawnee warrior and orator, whose home was in the Northwest. For years Tecumseh had been striving to unite the red men of the West and South in a supreme effort to roll back the swelling tide of white immigration. In 1811 he made a pilgrimage to the southern tribes, and his most fervent appeal was to that powerful body of Indians known as the Creek Confederacy, who lived in what is now the eastern part of Alabama and the southwestern part of Georgia. These proud and warlike

Indians were divided into two branches. The Upper Creeks had their homes along the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, and their villages extended some distance down the Alabama, which is formed by the junction of those two streams. The Lower Creek towns were on both sides of the Chattahoochee, which now separates southern Georgia from southern Alabama. The so-called Confederacy, a loose sort of alliance, claimed for a hunting ground the lands extending westward to the watershed between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, which unite to form the Mobile. But in the fork of these two rivers and along the Mobile and the Tombigbee were growing settlements of white men. The growth of these settlements was watched with disfavor and suspicion by the Creeks. A strong party, the Red Sticks, or hostiles, listened readily to Tecumseh's teaching. When he left for his home in the distant Northwest many were already dancing the "war-dance of the Lakes."The outbreak of the war with England came in good time for Tecumseh's plans. He at once put himself in alliance with the British, and in the summer of the Creek Red Sticks heard that they could get arms and ammunition at Pensacola, the capital of Spanish Florida. Spain was at peace with the United States, but Red Sticks were seen thronging to Pensacola and returning with arms and ammunition. The whites of the Mobile and Tombigbee country, then part of Mississippi Territory, organized for defence, waylaid a party returning from Pensacola, and were at first victorious, then defeated, in the so-called Battle of Burnt Corn. Thoroughly alarmed, the settlers now took refuge in stockades and forts. The military authorities of the United States made ready to defend Mobile, but recently seized from the Spaniards. At Fort Mims, near the point where the Alabama and Tombigbee form the Mobile, five hundred and fifty-three men, women, and children were pent up in an ill-planned inclosure, defended by a small force under an incompetent though courageous officer named Beasley. On the morning of August 30, 1813, Beasley was writing to his superior, General Claiborne, that he could hold the fort against any number of the enemy. At that very moment a thousand warriors lay hidden in a ravine but a few hundred yards from the open gate of the stockade. Their principal leader was William Weatherford, "the Red Eagle," a half-breed of much intelligence and dauntless courage. At noon, when the drums beat the garrison to dinner, the Indians rushed to the attack. At the end of the hot August day there remained of the

fort but a smouldering heap of ruins, ghastly with human bodies. Only a handful of the inmates escaped to spread the horrible news among the terrified settlers. Swift runners set off eastward, westward, and northward for help. A shudder ran over the whole country. The Southwest turned from the remoter events of the war in Canada to the disaster at home. "The Creeks!" "Weatherford!" "Fort Mims!" were the words on everybody's lips, while the major-general of the Tennessee militia still lay helpless from his shameful wound.From Mississippi on the west, from Georgia on the east, and from Tennessee on the north, volunteer armies were soon on the march for the Creek country. Tennessee, indeed, sent two different bodies of men. One came from East Tennessee, commanded by General John Cocke; the other came from West Tennessee, and at its head, pale and weak, his arm in a sling, his shoulder too sore to bear the weight of an epaulette, was Andrew Jackson. He had issued his orders from his bed. When a member of the legislature, come to discuss the expedition with him, expressed regret that he would not be able to lead it, the sick man muttered, with the inevitable oath, that he would lead it. But from the beginning to the end of his military service he was paying the penalty, not merely of the quarreling which had brought him wounds, but of intemperate eating and drinking, which had ruined his digestion. Sometimes he was tortured for hours with pains that could be relieved only by hanging his body, like a garment hung to dry, face downward, over the back of a chair, or, if he were on the march, over a sapling stripped and bent for the purpose.By the second week in October, Jackson was at Huntsville, on the Tennessee River. The entire command numbered about . Its supplies were to come by water from Knoxville, in East Tennessee, but the upper part of the river was not navigable by reason of the dryness of the season. Jackson stormed at the delay, but used the time in drilling his men and scouring the country with Coffee's cavalry. Then he cut his way over the mountains to a higher point on the river, hoping to find the supplies. His energy was great, but without food he could not, as he desired, dash at once into the enemy's country. He moved southward when he had food, halted when it gave out, and finally reached the Coosa. From his camp there, which he named Fort Strother, he dispatched Coffee to strike a first blow against the Creek town of Tallusahatchee. Coffee destroyed the town, and not a warrior escaped, for the whites were bitterly revengeful. A slain mother

embracing a living infant was found among the dead. Jackson himself took care of the child, sent it to The Hermitage, and he and his wife reared it to manhood.The next blow was struck at Talladega, thirty miles below Fort Strother, where a body of friendly Indians were besieged by a larger body of Red Sticks. Relying on General White, who was in the neighborhood with a force of Cocke's East Tennesseans, to protect Fort Strother, Jackson marched by night to Talladega. There, however, a dispatch reached him from White, who announced that he must return to Cocke. So at sunrise Jackson threw himself on the enemy, routed him with great loss, relieved the friendly Indians, and then marched back to camp, to find no provisions, and the sick and wounded as hungry as the rest. From that time the struggle with famine was for weeks his principal business. Ill as he was, he and his officers would have nothing the men could not have. A soldier coming to him to beg for food, he thrust his hand into his pocket, drew out some acorns, and courteously invited the man to share his dinner.Jackson was disposed to blame General Cocke for the trouble about supplies, because Cocke had undertaken to obtain supplies in Knoxville for both commands; but it seems clear now that Cocke was not to blame. Soon after the battle of Talladega Jackson's feeling against Cocke was strengthened. The warriors of the Hillabee towns, a part of the Creek Confederacy, sent a messenger to Jackson to sue for peace. He gave them his terms, and the messenger was returning to the Hillabees when General White, of Cocke's command, ignorant of what was going on, marched upon a Hillabee town, killed many of the warriors, and captured the women and children. Jackson, grieved and enraged at a blunder which probably prolonged the war and certainly made it fiercer, was easily persuaded that Cocke, his inferior officer, was trying to win laurels for himself, and in the end his anger led him to do grave injustice to a man who appears to have been faithful and honorable.And now for ten weeks the will of Andrew Jackson was tried to the uttermost. His starving troops were constantly on the verge of mutiny. The command was made up of two classes,—the militia, called into service against the Indians, and the volunteers, who had first enlisted for the expedition down the Mississippi. The militia, disheartened, started for Tennessee. Jackson drew up the volunteers

across their pathway, and drove them back to camp. Then the volunteers, in their turn, prepared to move northward, and he stopped them with the militia. The mounted men were permitted to go to Huntsville to get food for their horses, and most of them went on to their homes. The infantry, sullen and distrustful, were kept in camp only by the promise that in two days supplies would come from Nashville, whither Jackson was sending letter after letter to stir up the authorities. At the end of two days nothing had come. A few brave men volunteered to defend the camp while with the rest the general marched northward in search of food. The supplies soon came in sight, and the men were fed; but now they refused to go back to camp, and again turned northward. Jackson, with Coffee and a handful of others, threw himself in front of them, and with blazing eyes and dreadful oaths cowed them into obedience. Again they threatened mutiny, and once more, alone, on horseback, a musket in his hand, his disabled arm in its sling, he faced them, and swore he would shoot the first man who stirred. They hesitated, wavered, yielded.Seeing, however, that nothing could be done with the volunteers, Jackson finally permitted them to go, keeping with him the militia and a small body of Cocke's men. The militia claimed that their term would expire January 4, 1814; the term of Cocke's men would expire a week later. Anxiously awaiting reinforcements, Jackson got, instead, a letter from Governor Blount advising him to give up the struggle. But he would not give up; his magnificent spirit rose higher with every blow. He wrote the governor a letter that taught him his duty. Through the governor, in fact, that letter roused the whole State, and soon a new army was on the way from West Tennessee, while Cocke was marching another force southward from East Tennessee. With some five hundred raw recruits that reached him before Cocke's first command left, Jackson held Fort Strother. He even ventured to make a raid into the enemy's country, aiming at the town of Emuckfau. The Indians attacked him. He repulsed them, but soon made up his mind to return. On his way back, he was again attacked while crossing a creek, his rear guard was driven in, and for a moment a panic and rout was imminent. But the valor of a few men saved the army, and he got safely back to Fort Strother.He did not move again until the middle of March, and then he had five thousand men. Cocke, for a speech addressed to his troops when they

threatened mutiny, was sent to Nashville under arrest. To stamp out insubordination among the men from West Tennessee, a youth named Woods, who had been found guilty of mutiny, was shot before the whole army. The thirty-ninth regiment of regulars was now a part of the command, and the general proposed to use them, whenever occasion offered, to suppress insubordination among the volunteers. But from this time he had little of that to deal with, and was free to grapple with the Creeks, who had so far held their own against the Georgians and Mississippians.The centre of their resistance was the Hickory Ground, near the fork of the Coosa and Tallapoosa; but the final blow was struck at a bend in the Tallapoosa midway between its source and mouth. The spot was called by the Indians Tohopeka; by the whites, The Horseshoe. Across the neck of a small peninsula the hostiles had thrown up a rough line of breastworks. On the banks of the river they had gathered a number of canoes. Within the defences was a force of Red Sticks estimated at nine hundred, and several hundred women and children.Jackson moved down the Coosa to a point nearly even with Tohopeka, established a new camp, and by the evening of March he was in front of the enemy with about three thousand men, including a considerable body of friendly Indians. Resolving to make thorough work of it, he dispatched Coffee, with the friendly Indians and the cavalry, to surround the bend on the opposite bank. The next morning, with the artillery, he opened fire on the breastworks. Coffee, meantime, threw a force across the river and attacked the enemy from the rear. The line of breastworks was carried by assault. The slaughter of Creeks was dreadful. As usual, they fought to the last. Five hundred and fifty-seven bodies were found in the bend, and many perished trying to escape across the river. Jackson's loss was about two hundred killed and wounded.Tohopeka broke down the organized resistance of the Indians. When Jackson, a few days later, turned southward, he was able to march on to the Hickory Ground without fighting another battle. The Red Sticks for the most part fled to their kindred, the Seminoles, in Florida; but some came in and submitted to the iron hand which had crushed them. Jackson had been at the Hickory Ground but a short time when Weatherford himself came in and surrendered. Some of the men, remembering Fort Mims, would have done violence to the fallen chief,

but Jackson protected him. Soon afterwards, General Pinckney, of the regular army, arrived at Fort Jackson, which had been built in the river fork, and took command. When he ordered the Tennesseans to return to their homes, Jackson went with them, and his fellow citizens at Nashville gave him the first of many triumphal receptions. His eight months' work in the wilderness had made him easily the first man of Tennessee. Georgia had had a better chance than Tennessee to crush the Indians, for the distance and the natural obstacles were less; but Georgia had no such leader as Andrew Jackson. Another reward soon reached him. In May, General William Henry Harrison resigned his commission, and in his place Jackson was appointed major-general in the army of the United States. He was put in command of the southwestern district, including Mobile and New Orleans.But on his way to his post he had to stop again at Fort Jackson and complete his work among the Creeks. Acting under orders from the government, he compelled the chiefs there assembled, practically all of whom had been friendly to the United States during the war, to sign an "agreement and capitulation" by which they ceded to the United States all the land which they had claimed to the west of the Coosa. He carried the matter through with a high hand, but the Creeks themselves admired him and put into the agreement a cession of land to himself. It was, of course, not permissible for a negotiator to accept such a gift from the other party. However, the land was part of the region claimed by the United States and surrendered by the Creeks, and as a matter of fact, Jackson never got possession of it. This "treaty," as it was improperly called, was signed August 9, 1814, and then Jackson was free to take up his new duties as the defender of the Southwest against the British.Up to this time, except for the war with the Creeks and the bloodless capture of Mobile, the Southwest had taken little part in the contest. On land, the war had been mainly an affair of the North, where the Americans had been trying to wrest Canada from the mother country, and of the Northwest, where the British and the Indians had taken the offensive. The death of Tecumseh at the battle of the Thames, in November, , had made an end of that combination, and General William Henry Harrison had won some honor by his management of the campaign. But the several attempts at invading Canada were neither successful nor glorious. On the whole, the land campaigns of the Americans had been utterly disappointing. The little American

navy had indeed covered itself with glory, both on the high seas and on the Great Lakes; but from the seas, where it was vastly overmatched by Great Britain's immense naval resources, it had practically disappeared by the autumn of 1814. Only a few privateers still preyed on British commerce. And now, by the overthrow of Napoleon, Great Britain was left free to employ against America all those ships with which Nelson had won for her the empire of the sea, and those superb soldiers who, under Wellington, had driven the French out of Spain. Regiments of these veterans were sent to Canada. In August, an expedition under General Ross landed on the coast of Chesapeake Bay, defeated an American force at Bladensburg, took Washington, and burned the capitol and the President's mansion. The enemy was stronger than ever, and the United States were at the point of exhaustion.Moreover, the ruling class in one important section of the country was rather inclined to weaken than to help the government. The Federalist leaders in New England were against the French, against President Madison, against the war. They had been in opposition ever since President Jefferson went into office in 1801. Distrusting the Southwest, and opposing the expansion of the country in that direction, they had talked about a breaking up of the Union when Louisiana was purchased in 1803, and again when the State of Louisiana was admitted in 1811-12. When the war began, the governors of several New England States refused to turn their militia over to the Union generals. In 1814, several legislatures, the Massachusetts legislature in the lead, were arranging a convention to propose far-reaching changes in the Constitution of the United States, and many feared that the outcome would be the disruption of the Union and a separate New England confederation. True, New England men were fighting bravely by land and sea for their country, but the leading Federalists of New England were, as a rule, disaffected. A notable exception was John Quincy Adams, who, distrusting the leaders of his own party, had gone over to the party of Jefferson.The time was now come for the Southwest, the region so long distrusted, to show whether or not it was loyal to the Union. The British were aiming at that quarter a powerful military and naval force. Evidently believing the stories of disaffection in the Southwest, they had sent ahead of their expedition printed invitations to the Southwestern people to throw off the yoke of the Union. The

Spaniards of the Gulf coast, probably not ignorant of the American designs on both the Floridas, and resenting the seizure of Mobile, were no better than passive allies of the British, who were thus enabled to use Pensacola as a base for their campaign against Mobile, New Orleans, and the great Mississippi Valley beyond.When Jackson reached Mobile, in the middle of August, he was already thoroughly angered with the Spaniards for harboring refugee Creeks and giving them arms. He had always been in favor of seizing the Floridas; that had been the real object of the expedition down the Mississippi in 1813 which he had commanded. The true reason why he and his army were dismissed at Natchez was that the authorities at Washington had changed their mind about seizing West Florida. In July, 1814, he wrote to Washington for permission to take Pensacola, but no reply came, for the War Department was occupied with General Ross.The weak Spanish Governor of Florida—for Florida was then Spanish territory—permitted the British to make Pensacola their base of operations against the United States. This was a gross outrage, as we were at peace with Spain at the time, and General Jackson, acting on his own responsibility, invaded Florida in retaliation.Among the British at that time was an eccentric Irish officer, Colonel Edward Nichols, who enlisted and tried to make soldiers of a large number of the Seminole Indians. In 1815, after the war was over, Colonel Nichols again visited the Seminoles, who were disposed to be hostile to the United States, as Colonel Nichols himself was, and made an astonishing treaty with them, in which an alliance, offensive and defensive, between Great Britain and the Seminoles, was agreed upon. We had made peace with Great Britain a few months before, and yet this ridiculous Irish colonel signed a treaty binding Great Britain to fight us any time the Seminoles in the Spanish territory of Florida should see fit to make a war! If this extraordinary performance had been all, it would not have mattered so much, for the British government refused to ratify the treaty; but it was not all.Colonel Nichols, as if determined to give us as much trouble as he could, built a strong fortress on the Appalachicola River, and gave it to his friends the Seminoles, naming it "The British Post on the Appalachicola," where the British had not the least right to have any post whatever. Situated on a high bluff, with flanks securely guarded

by the river on one side and a swamp on the other, this fort, properly defended, was capable of resisting the assaults of almost any force that could approach it; and Colonel Nichols was determined that it should be properly defended, and should be a constant menace and source of danger to the United States.He armed it with one 32-pounder cannon, three 24-pounders, and eight other guns. In the matter of small-arms he was even more liberal. He supplied the fort with 2500 muskets, 500 carbines, 400 pistols, and 500 swords. In the magazines he stored 300 quarter casks of rifle powder and 763 barrels of ordinary gunpowder.When Colonel Nichols went away, his Seminoles soon wandered off, leaving the fort without a garrison. This gave an opportunity to a Negro bandit and desperado named Garçon to seize the place, which he did, gathering about him a large band of runaway Negroes, Choctaw Indians, and other lawless persons, whom he organized into a strong company of robbers. Garçon made the fort his stronghold, and began to plunder the country round about as thoroughly as any robber baron or Italian bandit ever did, sometimes venturing across the border into the United States.All this was so annoying and so threatening to our frontier settlements in Georgia, that General Jackson demanded of the Spanish authorities that they should reduce the place; and they would have been glad enough to do so, probably, if it had been possible, because the banditti plundered Spanish as well as other settlements. But the Spanish governor had no force at command, and could do nothing, and so the fort remained, a standing menace to the American borders.Matters were in this position in the spring of 1816, when General Gaines was sent to fortify our frontier at the point where the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers unite to form the Appalachicola.Back now to 1813, the absurd conduct of Colonel Nichols, who was at Pensacola with a force of British and Indians, occupying one of the two Spanish forts there, and issuing fiery proclamations, was enough to make Jackson act at once, even if he had hesitated before. He answered the colonel's proclamations with others equally fiery. But he had to wait for troops, which were to come from the neighboring States of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and Louisiana.Meantime, in September, a British squadron made a determined

attack on Fort Bowyer, at the entrance to Mobile Bay, and was repulsed, with the loss of its flagship, by Major Lawrence and a small garrison,—a gallant achievement, which made a good beginning of the campaign. At the end of October, Coffee, now a general officer, with nearly three thousand Tennesseans, reached the neighborhood of Mobile. With these, and about a thousand of the regulars he had already, Jackson promptly marched on Pensacola.One of the forts, and the city itself, he took; the other fort, Barrancas, was blown up by the British before he could reach it. The enterprise kept him but a week. It was all over before he received, in reply to his own letter of July, a letter from the Secretary of War forbidding him to attack Pensacola. Once again he had taken the responsibility to do what he felt to be necessary.By this time the government at Washington was alive to the great danger of the Southwest. Hurried orders were sent to the governors of the various States whose militia must be the main reliance for defence. It was suspected that New Orleans would be the first objective of the enemy, and a warning came to the city from Jean Lafitte, the leader of a gang of smugglers, whom the British had tried to win over. But the warning was not properly heeded, and Jackson himself was slow to make up his mind where the enemy would strike. He lingered at Mobile until November 22, and four days later Sir Edward Pakenham, with a large army and a great fleet, sailed from Jamaica for New Orleans. It was not until December 2 that a worn, thin man, tired and ill, whom nobody, failing to observe the look in his eyes, would have taken for the conqueror of the Creeks, rode into the curious little city that had been the French and then the Spanish capital of Louisiana, and which was not yet half like an American town. The bulk of its population was still French Creole and African; but among the Americans there was at least one man who already knew something of Andrew Jackson, and who was to know a great deal more. The leader of the New Orleans bar, and the most active of all the citizens in making ready for the enemy, was no other than that Edward Livingston, who, with Duane and Burr, had been friendly to the Tennessee Congressman eighteen years before at Philadelphia. He invited the new commander to his house, where Mrs. Livingston, a social leader in the town, soon discovered that the Indian fighter knew perfectly well how to deport himself in a drawing-room.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------IVNEW ORLEANSA glance at the map will give the reader some idea of the doubts that must have beset Jackson concerning the point at which the enemy would probably attack New Orleans. The island on which the city stands was accessible from the sea by at least three general routes. The British might approach by the Mississippi River, which flows by the city on the west, or over Lake Pontchartrain, which stretches out to the north, or over Lake Borgne, from the southeast. Jackson first inspected Fort St. Philip, sixty miles below, on the river; besides the fort, there were, for river defences, the schooner Carolina and the sloop Louisiana. His next move was to Lake Pontchartrain, and he was still in that quarter when news came that the enemy had chosen the third route and was already on Lake Borgne. The British found there six American gun-boats, which were all destroyed or taken after a brief but gallant struggle. That was December 14, and New Orleans was not yet in any good posture of defence. The most natural route from the lake to the immediate neighborhood of the city was up the Bayou Bienvenu, which led to the southern end of a level plain bounded on the west by the river and on the east by a dense cypress swamp. At the northern end of the plain lay New Orleans, and the distance was but six or seven miles; the plain was in most places about a mile wide. Between the head of the bayou and the city there was not a fort or even a line of intrenchments. For this state of things Jackson has not escaped blame from military critics.But if illness or any other cause had robbed him of his usual energy, the news of the disaster on Lake Borgne was the signal for a change in him and in the situation. Coffee, with part of the Tennessee volunteers, was up the river at Baton Rouge. A hurried summons brought him a hundred and twenty miles in two days, and on the th he was in camp a few miles above the city with eight hundred men. Two days later came General Carroll and a brigade of Tennessee militia, two thousand strong; with them came also a squadron of mounted Mississippi volunteers. Louisiana furnished a thousand militia; the city of New Orleans five or six hundred volunteers, of whom about a third were mulattoes. Jackson had also two incomplete regiments of regulars numbering together about eight hundred rank

and file. A Kentucky brigade of twenty-five hundred men was on the way, but without arms. Of Carroll's men, only one in ten had a musket. To provide arms for these new troops was a difficult matter, and many of the Kentuckians were still unarmed when the final struggle came. The city became panic-stricken and disorderly, and Jackson promptly placed it under martial law.Such was the situation when, on the morning of December 23, 1814 the British advance party, numbering about seventeen hundred, conveyed in small boats over the shallow Lake Borgne and up the Bienvenu, landed six miles below the city and seized the mansion of Major Villeré, a Creole gentleman of the neighborhood. Villeré was captured, but escaped, and at half past one o'clock Jackson knew in New Orleans that the enemy was at hand. By good luck, Major Latour, a French engineer, and the best historian of the campaign, was among the first to view the invaders, and he gave the general a correct idea of their position and numbers. As in all other crises, Jackson's resolve was taken at once. "By the Eternal," he exclaimed, "they shall not sleep on our soil!" He set his troops in motion for a night attack.Had the British marched on to New Orleans without stopping, it seems probable that they would have taken it that evening. But at nightfall upwards of two thousand Americans were between them and the city. Jackson was on the American right, near the river, with the regulars and the Louisiana contingent. Coffee, with his Tennesseans and the Mississippi horsemen, was on the left, next the cypress swamp. Carroll's brigade and the city militia were left to guard New Orleans on the north. The Carolina had crept down the river opposite the enemy's position, and at half past seven one of her guns gave the signal for attack.What followed, in the fog and darkness, is not clearly known. The British were surprised; but British soldiers are proverbially hard to drive from their own position. The Americans had the advantage of making the attack; but they were nearly all raw troops. Each side was confused and uncertain of its own and the enemy's position. Coffee, on the left, drove the British back towards the river, where they were protected by an old levee, while the new levee on the bank shielded them from the Louisiana's fire. On the right, the Americans were repulsed. Reinforcements reached the British army during the action. At half past nine the attack ceased. The enemy lost two hundred and

sixty-seven killed, wounded, and missing; the Americans, two hundred and thirteen. The night attack, however, strengthened the Americans. The enemy, overrating Jackson's force, became too cautious to advance at once, but waited until the entire army should be landed. The Americans gained time to build defenses.Jackson chose a line two miles above the battlefield, marked by a shallow canal or ditch which crossed the plain at its narrowest point, from the swamp to the river. Behind the ditch he threw up a parapet. In some places cotton bales were used, for the soil was but three feet deep; at that depth one found water, as indeed one found water almost everywhere,—in the foggy air, in the bayous, the river, the swamps, of that low land about New Orleans. In a few days Jackson's arrangements for defence were completed. Fifteen guns were disposed at intervals along the line, some of them manned by Lafitte and his buccaneers. The whole force numbered about three thousand, and the Kentuckians, though not all armed, were used as a reserve. On the river the Louisiana and the Carolina gave the enemy much trouble.The British army, when completely disembarked, seemed to justify the Duke of Wellington's confidence that it could rout any American army he ever heard of. Seven thousand trained British soldiers, seamen, and marines, and a thousand West Indian blacks, were assembled at Villeré's plantation, with from twenty-five to thirty guns. There were regiments which had helped Wellington to win Talavera, Salamanca, and Vitoria, and within a few short months some of these same regiments were to stand at Waterloo in that thin red line which Ney and Napoleon's guard could never break.Their general, Pakenham, Wellington's brother-in-law, was a distinguished pupil of his illustrious kinsman.Could frontiersmen who had never fought together before, who had never seen the face of a civilized foe, withstand the conquerors of Napoleon? But two branches of the same stubborn race were represented on that little watery plain. The soldiers trained to serve the strongest will in the Old World were face to face with the rough and ready yeomanry embattled for defence by the one man of the New World whose soul had most of iron in it.It was Salamanca against Tohopeka, discipline against individual alertness, the Briton of the little Isle against the Briton of the wastes

and wilds. But there was one great difference. Wellington, "the Iron Duke," was not there; "Old Hickory" was everywhere along the American lines. A grave and moderate historian, comparing the defense of New Orleans with the defence of Washington, finds the two situations not unlike. "The principal difference," he remarks, "was that Jackson commanded."Pakenham's first concern was to get rid of the Carolina and the Louisiana. Heavy guns were with great labor hauled from the fleet, and on December 27 the Carolina's crew were forced to abandon her, and the Louisiana was with difficulty got out of range; but meanwhile Commodore Patterson had mounted a battery across the river which in a measure made up for the ships. On the 28th, Pakenham advanced with his whole army, but retired, without making any assault, to await the result of an artillery duel. This was fought on New Year's day, 1815.The British used at least twenty-four guns, throwing some three hundred and fifty pounds of metal; the Americans, fifteen guns, throwing two hundred and twenty-four pounds. On both sides novel defences were employed,—cotton bales by the Americans, barrels of sugar by the British. The bales quickly caught fire, and from that time were discarded; the barrels proved as useless as if they had been empty. The result of the action would have been utterly surprising but for the discovery already made in Canada that Americans were better marksmen than British regulars. Three American guns were damaged; every one of the British batteries was silenced and abandoned. The American loss was thirty-four killed and wounded; the British, somewhat heavier.Pakenham waited a week for General Lambert to come up with two of his regiments, and then made his supreme effort. His plan was to advance on both sides of the river. During the night of January 7, Colonel Thornton, with men, was thrown across to the left bank, where General David Morgan had Louisiana militia, reinforced at the last moment by four hundred Kentuckians. Both British divisions were to attack before dawn. But the dawn came before Thornton was ready. He was, however, successful in his part of the programme. Morgan was driven back, his guns taken, and the British on the west bank passed up the river a mile beyond Jackson's line. Jackson never forgave the Kentuckians, although military critics incline to think they did all that should have been expected.

But on the east bank it was a different story. At six o'clock the main body of the British rushed upon the American lines. General Gibbs, with 2200, sought to pierce the defenses near the swamp. General Keane led along the river bank. General Lambert, with the reserve, brought up the rear. The whole force engaged was over 5000. Gibbs first came under the American fire. The head of his division melted before it. Gibbs himself fell, mortally wounded. Pakenham, dashing forward to rally the column, was killed three hundred yards from the lines. Keane, on the British left, was wounded and carried from the field.Nowhere did the enemy pierce or break the line of defense.A brave major did indeed cross the ditch and lift his head above the breastworks; but he lived only long enough to send back word that he died on the parapet like an English soldier.In truth, Pakenham's assault was a desperate venture, such as British commanders, relying on the valor of their men, have been too often led to make.At eight o'clock Jackson walked from end to end of his works, and not a British soldier was anywhere to be seen in an attitude of offence. The smoke of the artillery, clearing, discovered the enemy far distant, in full retreat to his camp, and the battlefield littered with piles of dead and wounded."I saw," said Jackson, "more than five hundred Britons emerging from the heaps of their dead comrades, all over the plain, rising up, and still more distinctly visible as the field became clearer, coming forward and surrendering to our soldiers."Here was revenge, indeed, for the sufferings of little Andy in the Waxhaws, for the sabre cut on his head, for his brothers, for his mother. But it is not known that any low word of vengeance passed his lips at the awful sight before him. The British dead were seven hundred, their wounded twice as many, and five hundred were taken.In the American lines on that side of the river eight were killed and thirteen wounded. Such a victory, so cheaply bought, is not paralleled in the warfare of civilized men.Lambert, succeeding Pakenham, recalled Thornton and gave up the important advantage the British won on the western bank. For ten days the armies lay as they were, and then the enemy withdrew as he

had come. A few days later, Fort Bowyer, on Mobile Point, was taken, and then the fighting ceased.During the closing weeks of January, by the slow methods of travel prevalent in those days, three messengers were hastening to Washington with tidings which the wearied President awaited with eagerness or fear according to the quarter from which they came. From Hartford, Conn., where the convention of New England malcontents had sat, he was to learn what demands were made by Americans who chose a time of war to change and weaken, if not indeed to destroy, the constitution of their country. From the American commissioners at Ghent he hoped against hope for news of a peace. To the Southwest he looked with dread, for few had dared to believe that New Orleans could be defended. The three messages arrived almost together, and all three were to stick in men's minds for years to come, and to mould men's thoughts about their country. From Ghent came tidings of a peace, not, indeed, glorious, or such as we had gone to war to win, but better than we had a right to expect. From New Orleans, tidings of a victory so splendid that it stirred the blood and brightened the eyes of every true American, and made it hard to remember that the war had not been altogether glorious.The threatening message from Hartford lost its terrors.In the great balance of the sections, the Northeast sank,the Southwest rose.When men recalled the war with shame, it was because of Hartford; when they spoke of it with pride, as in time they came to do, it was because they saw, on the parapet of New Orleans, looking out over heaps of British dead, the thin, tall figure of the horseman in Lafayette Square.True, the victory might seem worthless,for the peace was made before the battle was fought;but the victor had won for his countrymen something dearer than anything set forth in treaties.He had won them back their good opinion of themselves. In the prosperous years that were to follow, Andrew Jackson, the man of the Southwest, was to stand as no other man could for the American's faith in his country against the world.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. “The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger.”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 thecorrespondence, Monroe let Jackson know that he himself might be Secretary of War if he chose; but Jackson was content with his command.

Section V THE SEMINOLES AND THE POLITICIANSFor 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, mentioned before.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. Thecorrespondence 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.

Section VI THE WHITE HOUSEOn 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.

When Andrew Jackson became President of the United States he delivered his FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

Fellow-Citizens: About to undertake the arduous duties that I have been appointed to perform by the choice of a free people, I avail myself of this customary and solemn occasion to express the gratitude which their confidence inspires and to acknowledge the accountability which my situation enjoins. While the magnitude of their interests convinces me that no thanks can be adequate to the honor they have conferred, it admonishes me that the best return I can make is the zealous dedication of my humble abilities to their service and their good.As the instrument of the Federal Constitution it will devolve on me for a stated period to execute the laws of the United States, to superintend their foreign and their confederate relations, to manage their revenue, to command their forces, and, by communications to the Legislature, to watch over and to promote their interests generally. And the principles of action by which I shall endeavor to accomplish this circle of duties it is now proper for me briefly to explain.In administering the laws of Congress I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the Executive power, trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority. With foreign nations it will be my study to preserve peace and to cultivate friendship on fair and honorable terms, and in the adjustment of any differences that may exist or arise to exhibit the forbearance becoming a powerful nation rather than the sensibility belonging to a gallant people.In such measures as I may be called on to pursue in regard to the rights of the separate States I hope to be animated by a proper respect for those sovereign members of our Union, taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the Confederacy.The management of the public revenue—that searching operation in all governments—is among the most delicate and important trusts in ours, and it will, of course, demand no inconsiderable share of my official solicitude.

Under every aspect in which it can be considered it would appear that advantage must result from the observance of a strict and faithful economy. This I shall aim at the more anxiously both because it will facilitate the extinguishment of the national debt, the unnecessary duration of which is incompatible with real independence, and because it will counteract that tendency to public and private profligacy which a profuse expenditure of money by the Government is but too apt to engender. Powerful auxiliaries to the attainment of this desirable end are to be found in the regulations provided by the wisdom of Congress for the specific appropriation of public money and the prompt accountability of public officers.With regard to a proper selection of the subjects of impost with a view to revenue, it would seem to me that the spirit of equity, caution, and compromise in which the Constitution was formed requires that the great interests of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures should be equally favored, and that perhaps the only exception to this rule should consist in the peculiar encouragement of any products of either of them that may be found essential to our national independence.Internal improvement and the diffusion of knowledge, so far as they can be promoted by the constitutional acts of the Federal Government, are of high importance.Considering standing armies as dangerous to free governments in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment, nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power. The gradual increase of our Navy, whose flag has displayed in distant climes our skill in navigation and our fame in arms; the preservation of our forts, arsenals, and dockyards, and the introduction of progressive improvements in the discipline and science of both branches of our military service are so plainly prescribed by prudence that I should be excused for omitting their mention sooner than for enlarging on their importance. But the bulwark of our defense is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible. As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.

And so long as it is worth defending a patriotic militia will cover it with an impenetrable aegis. Partial injuries and occasional mortifications we may be subjected to, but a million of armed freemen, possessed of the means of war, can never be conquered by a foreign foe. To any just system, therefore, calculated to strengthen this natural safeguard of the country I shall cheerfully lend all the aid in my power.It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people. The recent demonstration of public sentiment inscribes on the list of Executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands.In the performance of a task thus generally delineated I shall endeavor to select men whose diligence and talents will insure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation, depending for the advancement of the public service more on the integrity and zeal of the public officers than on their numbers.A diffidence, perhaps too just, in my own qualifications will teach me to look with reverence to the examples of public virtue left by my illustrious predecessors, and with veneration to the lights that flow from the mind that founded and the mind that reformed our system. The same diffidence induces me to hope for instruction and aid from the coordinate branches of the Government, and for the indulgence and support of my fellow-citizens generally. And a firm reliance on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy, and has since upheld our liberties in various vicissitudes, encourages me to offer up my ardent supplications that He will continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.MARCH 4, 1829.

At the time that Andrew Jackson stepped into office he and Henry Clay were, the opposing 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, thus 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 quite the Jackson of the dueling pistol and Jackson of the sword. Nonetheless, 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. However, this is not saying that President Jackson was in ignorance of world conditions. As he said in his first report to the Union.. Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives: The task devolves on me, under a provision of the Constitution, to present to you, as the Federal Legislature of twenty-four sovereign States and 12,000,000 happy people, a view of our affairs, and to propose such measures as in the discharge of my official functions have suggested themselves as necessary to promote the objects of our Union.

In communicating with you for the first time it is to me a source of unfeigned satisfaction, calling for mutual gratulation and devout thanks to a benign Providence, that we are at peace with all mankind, and that our country exhibits the most cheering evidence of general welfare and progressive improvement. Turning our eyes to other nations, our great desire is to see our brethren of the human race secured in the blessings enjoyed by ourselves, and advancing in knowledge, in freedom, and in social happiness.Our foreign relations, although in their general character pacific and friendly, present subjects of difference between us and other powers of deep interest as well to the country at large as to many of our citizens. To effect an adjustment of these shall continue to be the object of my earnest endeavors, and notwithstanding the difficulties of the task, I do not allow myself to apprehend unfavorable results. Blessed as our country is with everything which constitutes national strength, she is fully adequate to the maintenance of all her interests. In discharging the responsible trust confided to the Executive in this respect it is my settled purpose to ask nothing that is not clearly right and to submit to nothing that is wrong; and I flatter myself that, supported by the other branches of the Government and by the intelligence and patriotism of the people, we shall be able, under the protection of Providence, to cause all our just rights to be respected.Of the unsettled matters between the United States and other powers, the most prominent are those which have for years been the subject of negotiation with England, France, and Spain. The late periods at which our ministers to those Governments left the United States render it impossible at this early day to inform you of what has been done on the subjects with which they have been respectively charged. Relying upon the justice of our views in relation to the points committed to negotiation and the reciprocal good feeling which characterizes our intercourse with those nations, we have the best reason to hope for a satisfactory adjustment of existing differences.With Great Britain, alike distinguished in peace and war, we may look forward to years of peaceful, honorable, and elevated competition. Everything in the condition and history of the two nations is calculated to inspire sentiments of mutual respect and to carry conviction to the minds of both that it is their policy to preserve the most cordial relations. Such are my own views, and it is not to be doubted that

such are also the prevailing sentiments of our constituents. Although neither time nor opportunity has been afforded for a full development of the policy which the present cabinet of Great Britain designs to pursue toward this country, I indulge the hope that it will be of a just and pacific character; and if this anticipation be realized we may look with confidence to a speedy and acceptable adjustment of our affairs.Under the convention for regulating the reference to arbitration of the disputed points of boundary under the fifth article of the treaty of Ghent, the proceedings have hitherto been conducted in that spirit of candor and liberality which ought ever to characterize the acts of sovereign States seeking to adjust by the most unexceptionable means important and delicate subjects of contention. The first statements of the parties have been exchanged, and the final replication on our part is in a course of preparation. This subject has received the attention demanded by its great and peculiar importance to a patriotic member of this Confederacy. The exposition of our rights already made is such as, from the high reputation of the commissioners by whom it has been prepared, we had a right to expect. Our interests at the Court of the Sovereign who has evinced his friendly disposition by assuming the delicate task of arbitration have been committed to a citizen of the State of Maine, whose character, talents, and intimate acquaintance with the subject eminently qualify him for so responsible a trust. With full confidence in the justice of our cause and in the probity, intelligence, and uncompromising independence of the illustrious arbitrator, we can have nothing to apprehend from the result.From France, our ancient ally, we have a right to expect that justice which becomes the sovereign of a powerful, intelligent, and magnanimous people. The beneficial effects produced by the commercial convention of 1822, limited as are its provisions, are too obvious not to make a salutary impression upon the minds of those who are charged with the administration of her Government. Should this result induce a disposition to embrace to their full extent the wholesome principles which constitute our commercial policy, our minister to that Court will be found instructed to cherish such a disposition and to aid in conducting it to useful practical conclusions.

The claims of our citizens for depredations upon their property, long since committed under the authority, and in many instances by the express direction, of the then existing Government of France, remain unsatisfied, and must therefore continue to furnish a subject of unpleasant discussion and possible collision between the two Governments. I cherish, however, a lively hope, founded as well on the validity of those claims and the established policy of all enlightened governments as on the known integrity of the French Monarch, that the injurious delays of the past will find redress in the equity of the future. Our minister has been instructed to press these demands on the French Government with all the earnestness which is called for by their importance and irrefutable justice, and in a spirit that will evince the respect which is due to the feelings of those from whom the satisfaction is required.Our minister recently appointed to Spain has been authorized to assist in removing evils alike injurious to both countries, either by concluding a commercial convention upon liberal and reciprocal terms or by urging the acceptance in their full extent of the mutually beneficial provisions of our navigation acts. He has also been instructed to make a further appeal to the justice of Spain, in behalf of our citizens, for indemnity for spoliations upon our commerce committed under her authority—an appeal which the pacific and liberal course observed on our part and a due confidence in the honor of that Government authorize us to expect will not be made in vain.With other European powers our intercourse is on the most friendly footing. In Russia, placed by her territorial limits, extensive population, and great power high in the rank of nations, the United States have always found a steadfast friend. Although her recent invasion of Turkey awakened a lively sympathy for those who were exposed to the desolations of war, we can not but anticipate that the result will prove favorable to the cause of civilization and to the progress of human happiness. The treaty of peace between these powers having been ratified, we can not be insensible to the great benefit to be derived by the commerce of the United States from unlocking the navigation of the Black Sea, a free passage into which is secured to all merchant vessels bound to ports of Russia under a flag at peace with the Porte. This advantage, enjoyed upon conditions by most of the powers of Europe, has hitherto been withheld from us.

During the past summer an antecedent but unsuccessful attempt to obtain it was renewed under circumstances which promised the most favorable results. Although these results have fortunately been thus in part attained, further facilities to the enjoyment of this new field for the enterprise of our citizens are, in my opinion, sufficiently desirable to insure to them our most zealous attention.Our trade with Austria, although of secondary importance, has been gradually increasing, and is now so extended as to deserve the fostering care of the Government. A negotiation, commenced and nearly completed with that power by the late Administration, has been consummated by a treaty of amity, navigation, and commerce, which will be laid before the Senate.During the recess of Congress our diplomatic relations with Portugal have been resumed. The peculiar state of things in that country caused a suspension of the recognition of the representative who presented himself until an opportunity was had to obtain from our official organ there information regarding the actual and, as far as practicable, prospective condition of the authority by which the representative in question was appointed. This information being received, the application of the established rule of our Government in like cases was no longer withheld.Considerable advances have been made during the present year in the adjustment of claims of our citizens upon Denmark for spoliations, but all that we have a right to demand from that Government in their behalf has not yet been conceded. From the liberal footing, however, upon which this subject has, with the approbation of the claimants, been placed by the Government, together with the uniformly just and friendly disposition which has been evinced by His Danish Majesty, there is a reasonable ground to hope that this single subject of difference will speedily be removed.Our relations with the Barbary Powers continue, as they have long been, of the most favorable character. The policy of keeping an adequate force in the Mediterranean, as security for the continuance of this tranquillity, will be persevered in, as well as a similar one for the protection of our commerce and fisheries in the Pacific.

The southern Republics of our own hemisphere have not yet realized all the advantages for which they have been so long struggling. We trust, however, that the day is not distant when the restoration of peace and internal quiet, under permanent systems of government, securing the liberty and promoting the happiness of the citizens, will crown with complete success their long and arduous efforts in the cause of self-government, and enable us to salute them as friendly rivals in all that is truly great and glorious.The recent invasion of Mexico, and the effect thereby produced upon her domestic policy, must have a controlling influence upon the great question of South American emancipation. We have seen the fell spirit of civil dissension rebuked, and perhaps forever stifled, in that Republic by the love of independence. If it be true, as appearances strongly indicate, that the spirit of independence is the master spirit, and if a corresponding sentiment prevails in the other States, this devotion to liberty can not be without a proper effect upon the counsels of the mother country. The adoption by Spain of a pacific policy toward her former colonies—an event consoling to humanity, and a blessing to the world, in which she herself can not fail largely to participate—may be most reasonably expected.The claims of our citizens upon the South American Governments generally are in a train of settlement, while the principal part of those upon Brazil have been adjusted, and a decree in council ordering bonds to be issued by the minister of the treasury for their amount has received the sanction of His Imperial Majesty. This event, together with the exchange of the ratifications of the treaty negotiated and concluded in 1828, happily terminates all serious causes of difference with that power.Measures have been taken to place our commercial relations with Peru upon a better footing than that upon which they have hitherto rested, and if met by a proper disposition on the part of that Government important benefits may be secured to both countries.Deeply interested as we are in the prosperity of our sister Republics, and more particularly in that of our immediate neighbor, it would be most gratifying to me were I permitted to say that the treatment which we have received at her hands has been as universally friendly as the early and constant solicitude manifested by the United States for her success gave us a right to expect.

But it becomes my duty to inform you that prejudices long indulged by a portion of the inhabitants of Mexico against the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the United States have had an unfortunate influence upon the affairs of the two countries, and have diminished that usefulness to his own which was justly to be expected from his talents and zeal. To this cause, in a great degree, is to be imputed the failure of several measures equally interesting to both parties, but particularly that of the Mexican Government to ratify a treaty negotiated and concluded in its own capital and under its own eye. Under these circumstances it appeared expedient to give to Mr. Poinsett the option either to return or not, as in his judgment the interest of his country might require, and instructions to that end were prepared; but before they could be dispatched a communication was received from the Government of Mexico, through its chargé d'affaires here, requesting the recall of our minister. This was promptly complied with, and a representative of a rank corresponding with that of the Mexican diplomatic agent near this Government was appointed. Our conduct toward that Republic has been uniformly of the most friendly character, and having thus removed the only alleged obstacle to harmonious intercourse, I can not but hope that an advantageous change will occur in our affairs.In justice to Mr. Poinsett it is proper to say that my immediate compliance with the application for his recall and the appointment of a successor are not to be ascribed to any evidence that the imputation of an improper interference by him in the local politics of Mexico was well founded, nor to a want of confidence in his talents or integrity, and to add that the truth of that charge has never been affirmed by the federal Government of Mexico in its communications with this.I consider it one of the most urgent of my duties to bring to your attention the propriety of amending that part of our Constitution which relates to the election of President and Vice-President. Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects.To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate; it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges or by the agency confided, under certain contingencies, to the House of Representatives.

Experience proves that in proportion as agents to execute the will of the people are multiplied there is danger of their wishes being frustrated. Some may be unfaithful; all are liable to err. So far, therefore, as the people can with convenience speak, it is safer for them to express their own will.The number of aspirants to the Presidency and the diversity of the interests which may influence their claims leave little reason to expect a choice in the first instance, and in that event the election must devolve on the House of Representatives, where it is obvious the will of the people may not be always ascertained, or, if ascertained, may not be regarded. From the mode of voting by States the choice is to be made by 24 votes, and it may often occur that one of these will be controlled by an individual Representative. Honors and offices are at the disposal of the successful candidate. Repeated ballotings may make it apparent that a single individual holds the cast in his hand. May he not be tempted to name his reward? But even without corruption, supposing the probity of the Representative to be proof against the powerful motives by which it may be assailed, the will of the people is still constantly liable to be misrepresented. One may err from ignorance of the wishes of his constituents; another from a conviction that it is his duty to be governed by his own judgment of the fitness of the candidates; finally, although all were inflexibly honest, all accurately informed of the wishes of their constituents, yet under the present mode of election a minority may often elect a President, and when this happens it may reasonably be expected that efforts will be made on the part of the majority to rectify this injurious operation of their institutions. But although no evil of this character should result from such a perversion of the first principle of our system—that the majority is to govern—it must be very certain that a President elected by a minority can not enjoy the confidence necessary to the successful discharge of his duties.In this as in all other matters of public concern policy requires that as few impediments as possible should exist to the free operation of the public will. Let us, then, endeavor so to amend our system that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.

I would therefore recommend such an amendment of the Constitution as may remove all intermediate agency in the election of the President and Vice-President. The mode may be so regulated as to preserve to each State its present relative weight in the election, and a failure in the first attempt may be provided for by confining the second to a choice between the two highest candidates. In connection with such an amendment it would seem advisable to limit the service of the Chief Magistrate to a single term of either four or six years. If, however, it should not be adopted, it is worthy of consideration whether a provision disqualifying for office the Representatives in Congress on whom such an election may have devolved would not be proper. While members of Congress can be constitutionally appointed to offices of trust and profit it will be the practice, even under the most conscientious adherence to duty, to select them for such stations as they are believed to be better qualified to fill than other citizens; but the purity of our Government would doubtless be promoted by their exclusion from all appointments in the gift of the President, in whose election they may have been officially concerned.The nature of the judicial office and the necessity of securing in the Cabinet and in diplomatic stations of the highest rank the best talents and political experience should, perhaps, except these from the exclusion. There are, perhaps, few men who can for any great length of time enjoy office and power without being more or less under the influence of feelings unfavorable to the faithful discharge of their public duties. Their integrity may be proof against improper considerations immediately addressed to themselves, but they are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt. Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people. Corruption in some and in others a perversion of correct feelings and principles divert government from its legitimate ends and make it an engine for the support of the few at the expense of the many. The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance; and I can not but believe that more

is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. I submit, therefore, to your consideration whether the efficiency of the Government would not be promoted and official industry and integrity better secured by a general extension of the law which limits appointments to four years.In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is matter of right. The incumbent became an officer with a view to public benefits, and when these require his removal they are not to be sacrificed to private interests. It is the people, and they alone, who have a right to complain when a bad officer is substituted for a good one. He who is removed has the same means of obtaining a living that are enjoyed by the millions who never held office. The proposed limitation would destroy the idea of property now so generally connected with official station, and although individual distress may be sometimes produced, it would, by promoting that rotation which constitutes a leading principle in the republican creed, give healthful action to the system.No very considerable change has occurred during the recess of Congress in the condition of either our agriculture, commerce, or manufactures. The operation of the tariff has not proved so injurious to the two former or as beneficial to the latter as was anticipated. Importations of foreign goods have not been sensibly diminished, while domestic competition, under an illusive excitement, has increased the production much beyond the demand for home consumption. The consequences have been low prices, temporary embarrassment, and partial loss. That such of our manufacturing establishments as are based upon capital and are prudently managed will survive the shock and be ultimately profitable there is no good reason to doubt.To regulate its conduct so as to promote equally the prosperity of these three cardinal interests is one of the most difficult tasks of Government; and it may be regretted that the complicated restrictions which now embarrass the intercourse of nations could not by common consent be abolished, and commerce allowed to flow in

those channels to which individual enterprise, always its surest guide, might direct it. But we must ever expect selfish legislation in other nations, and are therefore compelled to adapt our own to their regulations in the manner best calculated to avoid serious injury and to harmonize the conflicting interests of our agriculture, our commerce, and our manufactures. Under these impressions I invite your attention to the existing tariff, believing that some of its provisions require modification.The general rule to be applied in graduating the duties upon articles of foreign growth or manufacture is that which will place our own in fair competition with those of other countries; and the inducements to advance even a step beyond this point are controlling in regard to those articles which are of primary necessity in time of war. When we reflect upon the difficulty and delicacy of this operation, it is important that it should never be attempted but with the utmost caution.Frequent legislation in regard to any branch of industry, affecting its value, and by which its capital may be transferred to new channels, must always be productive of hazardous speculation and loss. In deliberating, therefore, on these interesting subjects local feelings and prejudices should be merged in the patriotic determination to promote the great interests of the whole. All attempts to connect them with the party conflicts of the day are necessarily injurious, and should be discountenanced. Our action upon them should be under the control of higher and purer motives. Legislation subjected to such influences can never be just, and will not long retain the sanction of a people whose active patriotism is not bounded by sectional limits nor insensible to that spirit of concession and forbearance which gave life to our political compact and still sustains it. Discarding all calculations of political ascendency, the North, the South, the East, and the West should unite in diminishing any burthen of which either may justly complain.The agricultural interest of our country is so essentially connected with every other and so superior in importance to them all that it is scarcely necessary to invite to it your particular attention. It is principally as manufactures and commerce tend to increase the value of agricultural productions and to extend their application to the wants and comforts of society that they deserve the fostering care of Government.

Looking forward to the period, not far distant, when a sinking fund will no longer be required, the duties on those articles of importation which can not come in competition with our own productions are the first that should engage the attention of Congress in the modification of the tariff. Of these, tea and coffee are the most prominent. They enter largely into the consumption of the country, and have become articles of necessity to all classes. A reduction, therefore, of the existing duties will be felt as a common benefit, but like all other legislation connected with commerce, to be efficacious and not injurious it should be gradual and certain.The public prosperity is evinced in the increased revenue arising from the sales of the public lands and in the steady maintenance of that produced by imposts and tonnage, notwithstanding the additional duties imposed by the act of 19th May, 1828, and the unusual importations in the early part of that year.The balance in the Treasury on January 1, 1829, was $5,972,435.81. The receipts of the current year are estimated at $24,602,230 and the expenditures for the same time at $26,164,595, leaving a balance in the Treasury on the 1st of January next of $4,410,070.81.There will have been paid on account of the public debt during the present year the sum of $12,405,005.80, reducing the whole debt of the Government on the 1st of January next to $48,565,406.50, including seven millions of 5 per cent stock subscribed to the Bank of the United States. The payment on account of public debt made on the 1st of July last was $8,715,462.87. It was apprehended that the sudden withdrawal of so large a sum from the banks in which it was deposited, at a time of unusual pressure in the money market, might cause much injury to the interests dependent on bank accommodations. But this evil was wholly averted by an early anticipation of it at the Treasury, aided by the judicious arrangements of the officers of the Bank of the United States.This state of the finances exhibits the resources of the nation in an aspect highly flattering to its industry and auspicious of the ability of Government in a very short time to extinguish the public debt. When this shall be done our population will be relieved from a considerable

portion of its present burthens, and will find not only new motives to patriotic affection, but additional means for the display of individual enterprise. The fiscal power of the States will also be increased, and may be more extensively exerted in favor of education and other public objects, while ample means will remain in the Federal Government to promote the general weal in all the modes permitted to its authority.After the extinction of the public debt it is not probable that any adjustment of the tariff upon principles satisfactory to the people of the Union will until a remote period, if ever, leave the Government without a considerable surplus in the Treasury beyond what may be required for its current service. As, then, the period approaches when the application of the revenue to the payment of debt will cease, the disposition of the surplus will present a subject for the serious deliberation of Congress; and it may be fortunate for the country that it is yet to be decided. Considered in connection with the difficulties which have heretofore attended appropriations for purposes of internal improvement, and with those which this experience tells us will certainly arise whenever power over such subjects may be exercised by the General Government, it is hoped that it may lead to the adoption of some plan which will reconcile the diversified interests of the States and strengthen the bonds which unite them. Every member of the Union, in peace and in war, will be benefited by the improvement of inland navigation and the construction of highways in the several States. Let us, then, endeavor to attain this benefit in a mode which will be satisfactory to all. That hitherto adopted has by many of our fellow-citizens been deprecated as an infraction of the Constitution, while by others it has been viewed as inexpedient. All feel that it has been employed at the expense of harmony in the legislative councils.To avoid these evils it appears to me that the most safe, just, and federal disposition which could be made of the surplus revenue would be its apportionment among the several States according to their ratio of representation, and should this measure not be found warranted by the Constitution that it would be expedient to propose to the States an amendment authorizing it. I regard an appeal to the source of power in cases of real doubt, and where its exercise is deemed

indispensable to the general welfare, as among the most sacred of all our obligations. Upon this country more than any other has, in the providence of God, been cast the special guardianship of the great principle of adherence to written constitutions. If it fail here, all hope in regard to it will be extinguished. That this was intended to be a government of limited and specific, and not general, powers must be admitted by all, and it is our duty to preserve for it the character intended by its framers. If experience points out the necessity for an enlargement of these powers, let us apply for it to those for whose benefit it is to be exercised, and not undermine the whole system by a resort to overstrained constructions. The scheme has worked well. It has exceeded the hopes of those who devised it, and become an object of admiration to the world. We are responsible to our country and to the glorious cause of self-government for the preservation of so great a good. The great mass of legislation relating to our internal affairs was intended to be left where the Federal Convention found it—in the State governments. Nothing is clearer, in my view, than that we are chiefly indebted for the success of the Constitution under which we are now acting to the watchful and auxiliary operation of the State authorities. This is not the reflection of a day, but belongs to the most deeply rooted convictions of my mind. I can not, therefore, too strongly or too earnestly, for my own sense of its importance, warn you against all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty. Sustained by its healthful and invigorating influence the federal system can never fall.In the collection of the revenue the long credits authorized on goods imported from beyond the Cape of Good Hope are the chief cause of the losses at present sustained. If these were shortened to six, nine, and twelve months, and warehouses provided by Government sufficient to receive the goods offered in deposit for security and for debenture, and if the right of the United States to a priority of payment out of the estates of its insolvent debtors were more effectually secured, this evil would in a great measure be obviated. An authority to construct such houses is therefore, with the proposed alteration of the credits, recommended to your attention.

It is worthy of notice that the laws for the collection and security of the revenue arising from imposts were chiefly framed when the rates of duties on imported goods presented much less temptation for illicit trade than at present exists. There is reason to believe that these laws are in some respects quite insufficient for the proper security of the revenue and the protection of the interests of those who are disposed to observe them. The injurious and demoralizing tendency of a successful system of smuggling is so obvious as not to require comment, and can not be too carefully guarded against. I therefore suggest to Congress the propriety of adopting efficient measures to prevent this evil, avoiding, however, as much as possible, every unnecessary infringement of individual liberty and embarrassment of fair and lawful business.On an examination of the records of the Treasury I have been forcibly struck with the large amount of public money which appears to be outstanding. Of the sum thus due from individuals to the Government a considerable portion is undoubtedly desperate, and in many instances has probably been rendered so by remissness in the agents charged with its collection. By proper exertions a great part, however, may yet be recovered; and whatever may be the portions respectively belonging to these two classes, it behooves the Government to ascertain the real state of the fact. This can be done only by the prompt adoption of judicious measures for the collection of such as may be made available. It is believed that a very large amount has been lost through the inadequacy of the means provided for the collection of debts due to the public, and that this inadequacy lies chiefly in the want of legal skill habitually and constantly employed in the direction of the agents engaged in the service. It must, I think, be admitted that the supervisory power over suits brought by the public, which is now vested in an accounting officer of the Treasury, not selected with a view to his legal knowledge, and encumbered as he is with numerous other duties, operates unfavorably to the public interest. It is important that this branch of the public service should be subjected to the supervision of such professional skill as will give it efficiency. The expense attendant upon such a modification of the executive department would be justified by the soundest principles of economy. I would recommend, therefore, that the duties now

assigned to the agent of the Treasury, so far as they relate to the superintendence and management of legal proceedings on the part of the United States, be transferred to the Attorney-General, and that this officer be placed on the same footing in all respects as the heads of the other Departments, receiving like compensation and having such subordinate officers provided for his Department as may be requisite for the discharge of these additional duties.The professional skill of the Attorney-General, employed in directing the conduct of marshals and district attorneys, would hasten the collection of debts now in suit and hereafter save much to the Government. It might be further extended to the superintendence of all criminal proceedings for offenses against the United States. In making this transfer great care should be taken, however, that the power necessary to the Treasury Department be not impaired, one of its greatest securities consisting in a control over all accounts until they are audited or reported for suit.In connection with the foregoing views I would suggest also an inquiry whether the provisions of the act of Congress authorizing the discharge of the persons of debtors to the Government from imprisonment may not, consistently with the public interest, be extended to the release of the debt where the conduct of the debtor is wholly exempt from the imputation of fraud. Some more liberal policy than that which now prevails in reference to this unfortunate class of citizens is certainly due to them, and would prove beneficial to the country. The continuance of the liability after the means to discharge it have been exhausted can only serve to dispirit the debtor; or, where his resources are but partial, the want of power in the Government to compromise and release the demand instigates to fraud as the only resource for securing a support to his family. He thus sinks into a state of apathy, and becomes a useless drone in society or a vicious member of it, if not a feeling witness of the rigor and inhumanity of his country. All experience proves that oppressive debt is the bane of enterprise, and it should be the care of a republic not to exert a grinding power over misfortune and poverty.Since the last session of Congress numerous frauds on the Treasury have been discovered, which I thought it my duty to bring under the cognizance of the United States court for this district by a criminal prosecution. It was my opinion and that of able counsel who were

consulted that the cases came within the penalties of the act of the Seventeenth Congress approved 3d March, 1823, providing for the punishment of frauds committed on the Government of the United States. Either from some defect in the law or in its administration every effort, to bring the accused to trial under its provisions proved ineffectual, and the Government was driven to the necessity of resorting to the vague and inadequate provisions of the common law.It is therefore my duty to call your attention to the laws which have been passed for the protection of the Treasury. If, indeed, there be no provision by which those who may be unworthily intrusted with its guardianship can be punished for the most flagrant violation of duty, extending even to the most fraudulent appropriation of the public funds to their own use, it is time to remedy so dangerous an omission; or if the law has been perverted from its original purposes, and criminals deserving to be punished under its provisions have been rescued by legal subtleties, it ought to be made so plain by amendatory provisions as to baffle the arts of perversion and accomplish the ends of its original enactment.In one of the most flagrant cases the court decided that the prosecution was barred by the statute which limits prosecutions for fraud to two years. In this case all the evidences of the fraud, and, indeed, all knowledge that a fraud had been committed, were in possession of the party accused until after the two years had elapsed. Surely the statute ought not to run in favor of any man while he retains all the evidences of his crime in his own possession, and least of all in favor of a public officer who continues to defraud the Treasury and conceal the transaction for the brief term of two years. I would therefore recommend such an alteration of the law as will give the injured party and the Government two years after the disclosure of the fraud or after the accused is out of office to commence their prosecution.In connection with this subject I invite the attention of Congress to a general and minute inquiry into the condition of the Government, with a view to ascertain what offices can be dispensed with, what expenses retrenched, and what improvements may be made in the organization of its various parts to secure the proper responsibility of public agents and promote efficiency and justice in all its operations.

The report of the Secretary of War will make you acquainted with the condition of our Army, fortifications, arsenals, and Indian affairs. The proper discipline of the Army, the training and equipment of the militia, the education bestowed at West Point, and the accumulation of the means of defense applicable to the naval force will tend to prolong the peace we now enjoy, and which every good citizen, more especially those who have felt the miseries of even a successful warfare, must ardently desire to perpetuate.The returns from the subordinate branches of this service exhibit a regularity and order highly creditable to its character. Both officers and soldiers seem imbued with a proper sense of duty, and conform to the restraints of exact discipline with that cheerfulness which becomes the profession of arms. There is need, however, of further legislation to obviate the inconveniences specified in the report under consideration, to some of which it is proper that I should call your particular attention.The act of Congress of the 2d March, 1821, to reduce and fix the military establishment, remaining unexecuted as it regards the command of one of the regiments of artillery, can not now be deemed a guide to the Executive in making the proper appointment. An explanatory act, designating the class of officers out of which this grade is to be filled—whether from the military list as existing prior to the act of 1821 or from it as it has been fixed by that act—would remove this difficulty. It is also important that the laws regulating the pay and emoluments of officers generally should be more specific than they now are. Those, for example, in relation to the Paymaster and Surgeon General assign to them an annual salary of $2,500, but are silent as to allowances which in certain exigencies of the service may be deemed indispensable to the discharge of their duties. This circumstance has been the authority for extending to them various allowances at different times under former Administrations, but no uniform rule has been observed on the subject. Similar inconveniences exist in other cases, in which the construction put upon the laws by the public accountants may operate unequally, produce confusion, and expose officers to the odium of claiming what is not their due.I recommend to your fostering care, as one of our safest means of national defense, the Military Academy. This institution has already

exercised the happiest influence upon the moral and intellectual character of our Army; and such of the graduates as from various causes may not pursue the profession of arms will be scarcely less useful as citizens. Their knowledge of the military art will be advantageously employed in the militia service, and in a measure secure to that class of troops the advantages which in this respect belong to standing armies.I would also suggest a review of the pension law, for the purpose of extending its benefits to every Revolutionary soldier who aided in establishing our liberties, and who is unable to maintain himself in comfort. These relics of the War of Independence have strong claims upon their country's gratitude and bounty. The law is defective in not embracing within its provisions all those who were during the last war disabled from supporting themselves by manual labor. Such an amendment would add but little to the amount of pensions, and is called for by the sympathies of the people as well as by considerations of sound policy. It will be perceived that a large addition to the list of pensioners has been occasioned by an order of the late Administration, departing materially from the rules which had previously prevailed. Considering it an act of legislation, I suspended its operation as soon as I was informed that it had commenced. Before this period, however, applications under the new regulation had been preferred to the number of 154, of which, on the 27th March, the date of its revocation, 87 were admitted. For the amount there was neither estimate nor appropriation; and besides this deficiency, the regular allowances, according to the rules which have heretofore governed the Department, exceed the estimate of its late Secretary by about $50,000, for which an appropriation is asked.Your particular attention is requested to that part of the report of the Secretary of War which relates to the money held in trust for the Seneca tribe of Indians. It will be perceived that without legislative aid the Executive can not obviate the embarrassments occasioned by the diminution of the dividends on that fund, which originally amounted to $100,000, and has recently been invested in United States 3 per cent stock.

The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our States have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits. A portion, however, of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection. Under these circumstances the question presented was whether the General Government had a right to sustain those people in their pretensions. The Constitution declares that "no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State" without the consent of its legislature. If the General Government is not permitted to tolerate the erection of a confederate State within the territory of one of the members of this Union against her consent, much less could it allow a foreign and independent government to establish itself there. Georgia became a member of the Confederacy which eventuated in our Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting her claim to certain limits, which, having been originally defined in her colonial charter and subsequently recognized in the treaty of peace, she has ever since continued to enjoy, except as they have been circumscribed by her own voluntary transfer of a portion of her territory to the United States in the articles of cession of 1802.Alabama was admitted into the Union on the same footing with the original States, with boundaries which were prescribed by Congress.

There is no constitutional, conventional, or legal provision which allows them less power over the Indians within their borders than is possessed by Maine or New York. Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the Six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this Government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this Government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the States which it was established to protect.Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within

the bounds of new States, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race.As a means of effecting this end I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use.There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes. There the benevolent may endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization, and, by promoting union and harmony among them, to raise up an interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race and to attest the humanity and justice of this Government.This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population.The accompanying report of the Secretary of the Navy will make you acquainted with the condition and useful employment of that branch of our service during the present year. Constituting as it does the best standing security of this country against foreign aggression, it claims

the especial attention of Government. In this spirit the measures which since the termination of the last war have been in operation for its gradual enlargement were adopted, and it should continue to be cherished as the offspring of our national experience. It will be seen, however, that notwithstanding the great solicitude which has been manifested for the perfect organization of this arm and the liberality of the appropriations which that solicitude has suggested, this object has in many important respects not been secured.In time of peace we have need of no more ships of war than are requisite to the protection of our commerce. Those not wanted for this object must lay in the harbors, where without proper covering they rapidly decay, and even under the best precautions for their preservation must soon become useless. Such is already the case with many of our finest vessels, which, though unfinished, will now require immense sums of money to be restored to the condition in which they were when committed to their proper element. On this subject there can be but little doubt that our best policy would be to discontinue the building of ships of the first and second class, and look rather to the possession of ample materials, prepared for the emergencies of war, than to the number of vessels which we can float in a season of peace, as the index of our naval power. Judicious deposits in navy-yards of timber and other materials, fashioned under the hands of skillful workmen and fitted for prompt application to their various purposes, would enable us at all times to construct vessels as fast as they can be manned, and save the heavy expense of repairs, except to such vessels as must be employed in guarding our commerce. The proper points for the establishment of these yards are indicated with so much force in the report of the Navy Board that in recommending it to your attention I deem it unnecessary to do more than express my hearty concurrence in their views. The yard in this District, being already furnished with most of the machinery necessary for shipbuilding, will be competent to the supply of the two selected by the Board as the best for the concentration of materials, and, from the facility and certainty of communication between them, it will be useless to incur at those depots the expense of similar machinery, especially that used in preparing the usual metallic and wooden furniture of vessels.

Another improvement would be effected by dispensing altogether with the Navy Board as now constituted, and substituting in its stead bureaus similar to those already existing in the War Department. Each member of the Board, transferred to the head of a separate bureau charged with specific duties, would feel in its highest degree that wholesome responsibility which can not be divided without a far more than proportionate diminution of its force. Their valuable services would become still more so when separately appropriated to distinct portions of the great interests of the Navy, to the prosperity of which each would be impelled to devote himself by the strongest motives. Under such an arrangement every branch of this important service would assume a more simple and precise character, its efficiency would be increased, and scrupulous economy in the expenditure of public money promoted.I would also recommend that the Marine Corps be merged in the artillery or infantry, as the best mode of curing the many defects in its organization. But little exceeding in number any of the regiments of infantry, that corps has, besides its lieutenant-colonel commandant, five brevet lieutenant-colonels, who receive the full pay and emoluments of their brevet rank, without rendering proportionate service. Details for marine service could as well be made from the artillery or infantry, there being no peculiar training requisite for it.With these improvements, and such others as zealous watchfulness and mature consideration may suggest, there can be little doubt that under an energetic administration of its affairs the Navy may soon be made everything that the nation wishes it to be. Its efficiency in the suppression of piracy in the West India seas, and wherever its squadrons have been employed in securing the interests of the country, will appear from the report of the Secretary, to which I refer you for other interesting details. Among these I would bespeak the attention of Congress for the views presented in relation to the inequality between the Army and Navy as to the pay of officers. No such inequality should prevail between these brave defenders of their country, and where it does exist it is submitted to Congress whether it ought not to be rectified.

The report of the Postmaster General is referred to as exhibiting a highly satisfactory administration of that Department. Abuses have been reformed, increased expedition in the transportation of the mail secured, and its revenue much improved. In a political point of view this Department is chiefly important as affording the means of diffusing knowledge. It is to the body politic what the veins and arteries are to the natural—conveying rapidly and regularly to the remotest parts of the system correct information of the operations of the Government, and bringing back to it the wishes and feelings of the people. Through its agency we have secured to ourselves the full enjoyment of the blessings of a free press.In this general survey of our affairs a subject of high importance presents itself in the present organization of the judiciary. An uniform operation of the Federal Government in the different States is certainly desirable, and existing as they do in the Union on the basis of perfect equality, each State has a right to expect that the benefits conferred on the citizens of others should be extended to hers. The judicial system of the United States exists in all its efficiency in only fifteen members of the Union; to three others the circuit courts, which constitute an important part of that system, have been imperfectly extended, and to the remaining six altogether denied. The effect has been to withhold from the inhabitants of the latter the advantages afforded (by the Supreme Court) to their fellow-citizens in other States in the whole extent of the criminal and much of the civil authority of the Federal judiciary. That this state of things ought to be remedied, if it can be done consistently with the public welfare, is not to be doubted. Neither is it to be disguised that the organization of our judicial system is at once a difficult and delicate task. To extend the circuit courts equally throughout the different parts of the Union, and at the same time to avoid such a multiplication of members as would encumber the supreme appellate tribunal, is the object desired. Perhaps it might be accomplished by dividing the circuit judges into two classes, and providing that the Supreme Court should be held by these classes alternately, the Chief Justice always presiding.

If an extension of the circuit-court system to those States which do not now enjoy its benefits should be determined upon, it would of course be necessary to revise the present arrangement of the circuits; and even if that system should not be enlarged, such a revision is recommended. A provision for taking the census of the people of the United States will, to insure the completion of that work within a convenient time, claim the early attention of Congress.The great and constant increase of business in the Department of State forced itself at an early period upon the attention of the Executive. Thirteen years ago it was, in Mr. Madison's last message to Congress, made the subject of an earnest recommendation, which has been repeated by both of his successors; and my comparatively limited experience has satisfied me of its justness. It has arisen from many causes, not the least of which is the large addition that has been made to the family of independent nations and the proportionate extension of our foreign relations. The remedy proposed was the establishment of a home department—a measure which does not appear to have met the views of Congress on account of its supposed tendency to increase, gradually and imperceptibly, the already too strong bias of the federal system toward the exercise of authority not delegated to it. I am not, therefore, disposed to revive the recommendation, but am not the less impressed with the importance of so organizing that Department that its Secretary may devote more of his time to our foreign relations. Clearly satisfied that the public good would be promoted by some suitable provision on the subject, I respectfully invite your attention to it.The charter of the Bank of the United States expires in 1836, and its stockholders will most probably apply for a renewal of their privileges. In order to avoid the evils resulting from precipitancy in a measure involving such important principles and such deep pecuniary interests, I feel that I can not, in justice to the parties interested, too soon present it to the deliberate consideration of the Legislature and the people. Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow-citizens, and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of establishing a uniform and sound currency.

Under these circumstances, if such an institution is deemed essential to the fiscal operations of the Government, I submit to the wisdom of the Legislature whether a national one, founded upon the credit of the Government and its revenues, might not be devised which would avoid all constitutional difficulties and at the same time secure all the advantages to the Government and country that were expected to result from the present bank.I can not close this communication without bringing to your view the just claim of the representatives of Commodore Decatur, his officers and crew, arising from the recapture of the frigate Philadelphia under the heavy batteries of Tripoli. Although sensible, as a general rule, of the impropriety of Executive interference under a Government like ours, where every individual enjoys the right of directly petitioning Congress, yet, viewing this case as one of very peculiar character, I deem it my duty to recommend it to your favorable consideration. Besides the justice of this claim, as corresponding to those which have been since recognized and satisfied, it is the fruit of a deed of patriotic and chivalrous daring which infused life and confidence into our infant Navy and contributed as much as any exploit in its history to elevate our national character. Public gratitude, therefore, stamps her seal upon it, and the meed should not be withheld which may hereafter operate as a stimulus to our gallant tars.I now commend you, fellow-citizens, to the guidance of Almighty God, with a full reliance on His merciful providence for the maintenance of our free institutions, and with an earnest supplication that whatever errors it may be my lot to commit in discharging the arduous duties which have devolved on me will find a remedy in the harmony and wisdom of your counsels.ANDREW JACKSON.

The party opposed to President Jackson 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 soon designated as the friends of Henry Clay, just 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, Henry Clay, disappeared from the scene. Until the autumn of 1831, Clay was in retirement in Kentucky.Consequently, 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. As history unraveled, that was a very important division indeed. Andrew 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 President Jackson did wish for advice, 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 he sought advice from Isaac Hill, who had come to Washington after fighting the Adams men in New Hampshire, -- or from Amos Kendall, who had dared to oppose Clay in Kentucky, – or from General Duff Green, editor of "The Telegraph," which was 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.Kendall was a "little whiffet of a man," but before long the opposition decided to see his hand in every event of any 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 Andrew Jackson was once resolved on any course his friends could no more stop him than his enemies could. A clerk in the State Department once 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, but she was also 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.

That endeared her to Andrew Jackson who had uttered the phrase, “Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.” The O'Neills had no place in Washington society, and there were ugly stories about the supposed conduct of Mrs. Timberlake with Senator Eaton before the death of Timberlake, who had killed himself at sea.Washington society believed these stories. President Jackson refused to believe them, and he 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 while Martin Van Buren, who was a widower himself, showed the lady his marked attention. And it came to pass that 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 one 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, that had to be protected against the products of European countries. On the contrary, they exported much of their cotton to England, and the planters 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 abundantly 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, John C. 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 dramatic change of Constitutional perceptions.The issue 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, Daniel 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. President Jackson 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 the postmaster-general was 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 in Jackson's cabinet. Consequently, 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 solid supporting 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 up for re-election. For a time he seemed to hesitate; he ceased to hesitate when it became apparent that Henry Clay would be the candidate chosen by 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.On 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 upon 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.

Henry Clay boldly determined to force the president into 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. Henry Clay 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 Martin 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 nation for a supporting vote.Jackson went into the presidential 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 Henry Clay had designated it to be the American system, and he was 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's politicians threw her votes away on yet a fourth candidate. Fellow citizen of Tennessee, David Crockett, quit being a friend of Andrew Jackson in Congress and publicly declared "The time will and must come, when honesty will receive its reward, and when the people of this nation will be brought to a sense of their duty, and will pause and reflect how much it cost us to redeem ourselves from the government of one man." None of it did any good. Jackson received 219 electoral votes to 49 for Clay, 11 for Floyd, who was the nullification candidate, and seven for Wirt, who was the Anti-Mason candidate. Anyone could see that Andrew Jackson's popular vote was more than twice that of Henry Clay's, and Jackson had actually carried the New England States of Maine and New Hampshire as well. It was legitimate reason to give Andrew Jackson a swelled sense of importance.During his first term, Jackson exercised his great office like a general, and he entered upon his second term with an even firmer belief that he ought to have his way in all things. Had not the people given an answer to Clay and Biddle and Calhoun and Marshall; to the corrupters of the government and to the enemies of the President? Hadn't the nation stood up to the nullifiers of the law and the slanderers of Peggy Eaton? Andrew Jackson felt he was justified in believing his overwhelming victory was an endorsement from the people, and a warrant to go right 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.

He 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 that issue before. Benton and Webster joined hands on the issue. In fact, even Henry Clay supported the President because when it came right down to it, , who, Henry Clay loved his country with his whole heart, just like Andrew Jackson did. John C. Calhoun stood out against Andrew Jackson, alone. He left the VicePresident's seat, came down upon the floor as a Senator, and defended nullification against every last one of 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 Henry Clay avoided the struggle, by presenting the second of his most famous compromises. A new tariff law, providing for a gradual reduction of duties, was passed along with the force bill. The South Carolinians took a close look at Winfield Scott's hand – and chose the olive branch instead of the sword; the nullifiers first postponed, and then repealed their ordinance. That made Andrew Jackson a national hero as he had never stood out before. David Crockett polished up old Betsy and headed for Texas. In the summer of 1833, Andrew Jackson made a journey to the Northeast, – and even New England, where David Crockett had been publicly cheered by thousands for dumping his alliance with Jackson, made him welcome. Harvard College went so far as to make him a Doctor of Laws. Andrew Jackson who had said that only knowing one way to spell a word was a sure sign of ignorance, felt vindicated. 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.

Andrew Jackson, child of the Waxhaws, was at the summit of his career. No other living American could rival him in popularity; no other American of any station had ever held such power over his countrymen since George Washington had fowned at the whisper that suggested he might become a king.But Andrew Jackson was only a man, after all. He had been 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 he invited a surgeon to 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 yet destroyed. Jackson raised his dueling pistol once more The public funds were still in its keeping; its power in the business world was just as great as ever. President Jackson believed, moreover, that Biddle was using money freely to fight him, and would sooner or later get what he wanted from Congress. Jackson prepared, therefore, to crush the Bank by withdrawing all 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 national 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 withdraw those funds, and by the Eternal, the Secretary of the Treasury was now William Duane, of Philadelphia, a son of Jackson's early and staunch friend. Shortly after Jackson's second inauguration, Livingston had been appointed minister to France, the Secretary of the Treasury had beem transferred over to the State Department, and Duane had been called to serve in the Treasury.But strangely enough, William Duane would not fall in with the President's plan. He did not believe the deposits were in danger, and

he refused to sign an order for their removal. Jackson argued with Duane, then he grew angry, and finally dismissed him. Duane defended his course ably. Lewis also advised against removing those funds. Benton favored it, but in this he was almost alone among the nation's leading public men. Jackson, however, was started on a collision course, 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 had crumpled. When Congress met, it proved to be, everything considered, probably the ablest legislature ever assembled in America; the only ones missing were two of Jackson's old friends, David Crockett and Sam Houston. 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 all three were now solidly united against the President. The debates were long and furious. A financial panic throughout the country added to the excitement as banks failed all across the nation. Clay led the attack against Jackson, Calhoun and Webster supported his efforts with Benton bearing the brunt of it. In the House, the Jackson men had a majority; in the Senate, the opposition did. By the Eternal, 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 that office by the Constitution. President Jackson responded with a fiery response that singed hairs on both sides of the aisle, but when the votes were counted, the Senate had 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 charter from Pennsylvania, and kept going for some years. But Jackson's sharp sword had dealt it a deathblow. The bank 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 complete disgrace, virtually a signed admission of guilt that those charges from Andrew Jackson had been verified. However, its ruin was not accomplished without great disturbance to financial conditions. The country had been prosperous a long time. Money had been plentiful. Bank speculation had been the order of the day with many printing their own money. The "pet banks," chosen to be the depositories of the government money, were badly managed. The surplus, distributed among the States, accomplished nothing and simply strengthened the impulse to wild speculation. Paper money was everywhere too plentiful. Prophets warned the nation that a collapse was shortly at hand because a dangerous financial condition prevailed and greed was gripping the hearts of all citizens. 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 of the realm. That was like the thunderclap which precedes the storm: but that financial storm of indignation broke on his successor, not on him.Andrew Jackson also bequeathed to his successor an excellent opportunity for a nice foreign war. France had agreed to pay the spoliation claims, but the French Chambers had failed to appropriate the money. Louis Philippe, the king, suggested to 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 so angry it refused to pay. At this point, Andrew Jackson suggested reprisals.The House, led by Adams, who never fell behind Jackson on a question of foreign relations, sustained the President. Fortunately, the Senate stalled a vote until 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 bill it owed to America.The final settlement came at the very end of Jackson's administration. The presidential election of 1836 had fulfilled his wish that Martin Van Buren should be his successor. In January 1837 the resolution of censure was solemnly expunged from the records of the Senate. That body of politicians was now being controlled by his friends, and his enemy, John Marshall, was safely dead. Jackson suggested Taney become Chief Justice, and the nomination was successfully confirmed. Andrew Jackson, his head bloody perhaps, but thoroughly unbowed, issued a farewell address to the people, after the manner of George Washington, and he stood there, a white-haired, impressive figure, to watch the inauguration of Martin Van Buren. Then Jackson journeyed home to The Hermitage where he would receive his last, glorious welcome from his neighbors.

It was the most triumphant home-coming of them all. He had beaten every last one of all his enemies. In 1834, 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 had found just one step from being president, was left as a shattered, gloomy and tragical figure, the Ishmael of American politics. David Crockett had perished at the Alamo; Sam Houston had politically levered Texas into the United States. As for Jackson's loyal friends, he left them in power everywhere,—in congress, on the bench, in the White House. To his friends, and his enemies Jackson had been a touch of 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 untutored 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 Houston was engineering the annexation of Texas and that issue was taking first place among public questions. Andrew Jackson had encouraged Sam Houston to go to Texas, and had done all he could, and more than any other President would have dared, to forward that nation's movement for independence. Now that Texas was ready to come into the Union, Jackson 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 Polk stood for annexation.On the bright stage of American politics it was as if Henry Clay, now also an old man, was once more about to lift the presidential cup to his lips, and the relentless hand of Andrew Jackson had reached out and dashed it out of his hand, and it fell, as shards to the ground.And 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, and whose Bible he had 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 had made a profession while he stood before the people, his enemies would accuse him of hypocrisy. He kept his word to his dear sweet wife. Trembling and weeping, he stood before the altar in the tiny church he had built for her and he bravely took the vows of a Christian. It had been very hard for the old warrior 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.Then, on June 8, 1845, in his seventy-ninth year of life, he died. His last words to those about him bade them come, meet him in heaven. When they were sure Old Hickory was dead, someone asked, “Will he go to Heaven?” and the honest answer was, “He will if he wants to.”

So there, we have come down to the final judgment bar and must ask ourselves, what is the rightful place in history of this fiery horseman reared up in front of the White House? Too many people stand by some arrogant answer they made years ago – but, when when all is said and done, “What manner of man was he?” Andrew Jackson made many mistakes in his lifetime, he did much injustice to men around him, he espoused many causes without waiting to hear the other side, he was too often bitter, too often violent, and in dealing out vengeance he was even cruel.How ignorant he was on many subjects, how prejudiced he was on others. In contact with men who seemed to surpass him in wisdom, in knowledge, in fairness of mind he defied them all and declared that his opinion was all that mattered. Perhaps, birthed from this safe perch in the 21st century – when presidents rush around the world with penitent apologies and tremble in the shadows of the Rose Garden when foreign dignitaries breathe out their fierce hot threats, you will be tempted to deny Andrew Jackson his place among those calm, just, great men who poised forever to see both sides of every issue and who strived ardently to stand on the right side, as American posterity would see it. But will your longest inquiry ever discover another American of his times who had in such ample measure the gifts of courage and iron will? It's true; Many men had fewer faults, many people had superior talents, but not one of them all had so great a spirit. All of us must bow the knee and admit that Andrew Jackson was the one American who had his own way. He was the American whose simple virtues his countrymen most clearly understood. He was the one American whose trespasses they most readily forgave; and until Americans have altogether dumped an admiration for courage, many, like the Democrats of the 'Twenties and 'Thirties, will still "vote for Jackson" and pray that he escapes from the grave to lead this nation once more. They were eager to vote for the poor boy who fought his way, step by step, to the highest office in America. They would have voted for the soldier who always hurried to meet the enemy at the gate. They would have voted for the President who never shirked a responsibility.

They would have voted for the man who refused to think evil of a woman – or to speak harshly to a child. Certainly, education, and training in statecraft, would have saved him many errors; culture might have softened the fierceness of his nature.

But even as untrained, uncultivated, and imperfect as Andrew Jackson was -- not one of his contemporaries had so good a right to stand before our capitol as a solid symbol for all to see, the great, unconquerable spirit of America. “Old Hickory” was an American that all of us can be proud of.

The end.

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