manfully for three months against the combined effects of consumption,
dropsy, and dysentery. But on Sunday, the 8th of June, the end came.
In accordance with a pledge which he had given his wife years before,
he had become a communicant of the Presbyterian church; and his last
words to the friends about his bedside were messages of Christian
cheer. After two days the body was laid to rest in the Hermitage
garden, beside the grave of the companion whose loss he had never
ceased to mourn with all the feeling of which his great nature was
capable. The authorities at the national capital ordered public honors
to be paid to the ex-President, and gatherings in all parts of the
country listened with much show of feeling to appropriate eulogies.

"General Jackson," said Daniel Webster to Thurlow Weed in 1837, "is an
honest and upright man. He does what he thinks is right, and does it
with all his might. He has a violent temper, which leads him often to
hasty conclusions. It also causes him to view as personal to himself
the public acts of other men. For this reason there is great
difference between Jackson angry and Jackson in good humor. When he is
calm, his judgment is good; when angry, it is usually bad.... His
patriotism is no more to be questioned than that of Washington. He is
the greatest General we have and, except Washington, the greatest we
ever had."

To this characterization of Andrew Jackson by his greatest American
contemporary it is impossible to make noteworthy addition. His was a
character of striking contradictions. His personal virtues were
honesty, bravery, open-heartedness, chivalry toward women,
hospitality, steadfastness. His personal faults were irascibility,
egotism, stubbornness, vindictiveness, and intolerance of the opinions
of others. He was not a statesman; yet some of the highest qualities
of statesmanship were in him. He had a perception of the public will
which has rarely been surpassed; and in most, if not all, of the great
issues of his time he had a grasp of the right end of the question.

The country came to the belief that the National Bank should not be
revived. It accepted and perpetuated Van Buren's independent treasury
plan. The annexation of Texas, which Jackson strongly favored, became
an accomplished fact with the approval of a majority of the people.
The moderated protective tariff to which Jackson inclined was kept up
until the Civil War. The removal of the Indians to reservatio