ssion as to who
wrote the once famous "Jack Downing's" letters, but we might almost say
that they wrote themselves. Nobody was ever less of a humorist than
Andrew Jackson, and it was therefore the more essential that he should
be the cause of humor in others. It was simply inevitable that during
his progresses through the country there should be some amusing shadow
evoked, some Yankee parody of the man, such as came from two or three
quarters under the name of Jack Downing. The various records of Monroe's
famous tours are as tame as the speeches which these expeditions brought
forth, and John Quincy Adams never made any popular demonstrations to
chronicle; but wherever Jackson went there went the other Jack, the
crude first-fruits of what is now known through the world as "American
humor." Jack Downing was Mark Twain and Hosea Biglow and Artemus Ward in
one. The impetuous President enraged many and delighted many, but it is
something to know that under him a serious people first found that it
knew how to laugh.

The very extreme, the perfectly needless extreme, of political
foreboding that marked the advent of Jackson furnished a background of
lurid solemnity for all this light comedy. Samuel Breck records in his
diary that he conversed with Daniel Webster in Philadelphia, March 24,
1827, upon the prospects of the government. "Sir," said Mr. Webster, "if
General Jackson is elected, the government of our country will be
overthrown; the judiciary will be destroyed; Mr. Justice Johnson will be
made Chief-Justice in the room of Mr. Marshall, who must soon retire,
and then in half an hour Mr. Joseph Washington and Mr. Justice Story
will resign. A majority will be left with Mr. Johnson, and every
constitutional decision hitherto made will be reversed." As a matter of
fact, none of these results followed. Mr. Justice Johnson never became
Chief-Justice; Mr. Marshall retained that office till his death in 1835;
Story and Washington also died in office; the judiciary was not
overthrown, nor the government destroyed. But the very ecstasy of these
fears stimulated the excitement of the public mind. No matter how
extravagant the supporters of Jackson might be, they could hardly go
farther in that direction than did the Websters in the other.

But it was not the fault of the Jackson party if anybody went beyond
them in exaggeration. An English traveller, William E. Alexander, going
in a stage-coach from Baltimore to Washington in 18