recognized in him
its truest and most eminent representative. The alliance with the
Calhoun forces was kept up, although it was already jeopardized by the
feeling of the South Carolinian's friends that they, and not Jackson's
friends, should lead in the coming campaign. After a good deal of
hesitation the supporters of Crawford came over also. Van Buren
coquetted with the Adams forces for a year, and the old-line
Republicans, strong in the Jeffersonian faith, brought themselves to
the support of the Tenneseean with difficulty; but eventually both
northern and southern wings of the Crawford contingent alined
themselves against the Administration. The decision of Van Buren
brought into the Jackson ranks a past master in party management, "the
cleverest politician in a State in which the sort of politics that is
concerned with the securing of elections rather than fighting for
principles had grown into a science and an art." By 1826 the Jackson
forces were welded into a substantial party, although for a long time
their principles involved little more than hostility to Adams and
enthusiasm for Jackson, and they bore no other designation than
Jackson men.

The elements that were left to support the Administration were the
followers of Adams and Clay. These eventually drew together under the
name of National Republicans. Their strength, however, was limited,
for Adams could make no appeal to the masses, even in New England;
while Clay, by contributing to Jackson's defeat, had forfeited much of
the popularity that would otherwise have been his.

If the story of Adams's Administration could be told in detail, it
would be one long record of rancorous warfare between the President
and the Jacksonian opposition in Congress. Adams, on the one hand,
held inflexibly to his course, advocating policies and recommending
measures which he knew had not the remotest chance of adoption; and,
on the other hand, the opposition--which in the last two years of the
Administration controlled the Senate as well as the House of
Representatives--balked at no act that would humiliate the President
and make capital for its western idol. At the outset the Jacksonians
tried to hold up the confirmation of Clay. It fell furiously, and
quite without discrimination, upon the President's great scheme of
national improvements, professing to see in it evidence of an
insatiable desire for "concentration." In the discussion of a proposed
amendment to the Cons