himself guilty of anything
akin to it, he would but rarely condescend to those innocent amenities
by which the good-will of others may be conciliated. His virtue was
freezing cold of touch, and forbidding in its look." When the
Presidential election went into the House in 1824, the influence of
Clay--himself a defeated candidate--was decisively thrown for Adams
against Jackson, and Clay served as President Adams's Secretary of
State. The two men supplemented each other well; Clay less austerely
virtuous, but far more lovable; his personal ideals less exacting, but
his sympathies wider. The co-operation between them was honorable to
both and serviceable to the country; but partisan bitterness stigmatized
it as a corrupt alliance; the air was full of suspicion and jealousy
toward the cultivated and prosperous class that had hitherto supplied
the chiefs of the government, and the rising democratic sentiment found
a most congenial hero in Andrew Jackson.

He was a rough backwoodsman; a fighter by nature and a passable soldier;
a staunch friend and a patriot at heart; ignorant, wholly unversed in
statesmanship, arbitrary in temper, and inclined to judge all subjects
from a personal standpoint. He easily defeated Adams for the Presidency
in 1828. His election marked the ascendancy, long to continue, of a more
ignoble element in the nation's political life. His administration began
the employment of the spoils system; and it "handled intricate financial
problems as a monkey might handle the works of a watch." Jackson had
small regard for the rights of those who got in the way of himself, his
party, or his country; he had trampled recklessly on the Indian; and his
triumph fell as a heavy discouragement on the quiet but widespread
movement to elevate the negro. He treated all questions in a personal
way; and the first great battle of his administration was to compel
social recognition in Washington for the wife of one of his cabinet
members whose reputation scandal had breathed upon, unjustly as Jackson
believed. In the revolt against her recognition a leader was the
Vice-President, John C. Calhoun, himself a man of blameless morals and
an advocate of the highest social standards. He thereby lost at once the
favor of Jackson, which was transferred to Martin Van Buren, a wily New
York politician, quite ready to call on any lady or support any policy
that his chief might approve. The breach between Jackson and Calhoun was
widened