otype_.

Daniel Webster
_After a drawing from a daguerreotype_.

John C. Calhoun
_From a daguerreotype_.

James K. Polk
_From a daguerreotype_.

Abraham Lincoln
_After an unretouched negative from life, found in 1870_.

General George B. McClellan
_After a photograph from life in the possession of the War Department,
Washington, D.C._

Ulysses S. Grant
_After the painting by Chappel_.

Assassination of President Lincoln
_After the drawing by Fr. Roeber_.

Robert E. Lee
_From a photograph_.

BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY.

ANDREW JACKSON.

1767-1845.

PERSONAL POLITICS.

It is very seldom that a man arises from an obscure and humble position
to an exalted pre-eminence, without peculiar fitness for the work on
which his fame rests, and which probably no one else could have done so
well. He may not be learned, or cultured; he may be even unlettered and
rough; he may be stained by vulgar defects and vices which are fatal to
all dignity of character; but there must be something about him which
calls out the respect and admiration of those with whom he is
surrounded, so as to give him a start, and open a way for success in the
business or enterprise where his genius lies.

Such a man was Andrew Jackson. Whether as a youth, or as a man pursuing
his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier settlement,
he was about the last person of whom one would predict that he should
arise to a great position and unbounded national popularity. His birth
was plebeian and obscure. His father, of Scotch-Irish descent, lived in
a miserable hamlet in North Carolina, near the South Carolina line,
without owning a single acre of land,--one of the poorest of the poor
whites. The boy Andrew, born shortly after his father's death in 1767,
was reared in poverty and almost without education, learning at school
only to "read, write, and cipher;" nor did he have any marked desire for
knowledge, and never could spell correctly. At the age of thirteen he
was driven from his native village by its devastation at the hands of
the English soldiers, during the Revolutionary War. His mother, a worthy
and most self-reliant woman, was an ardent patriot, and all her
boys--Hugh, Robert, and Andrew--enlisted in the local home-guard. The
elder two died, Hugh of exposure and Robert of prison small-pox, while
Andrew, who had also been captured and sick of the disease, survived
this early training in the scenes of war for fur