pose of New Orleans,
'Tis famed for youth and beauty,
There're girls of every hue, it seems,
From snowy white to sooty,
Now Packenham had made his brags,
If he that day was lucky,
He'd have those girls and cotton-bags
In spite of old Kentucky.
But Jackson, he was wide awake,
And was not scared at trifles,
For well he knew Kentucky's boys,
With their death-dealing rifles.
He led them down to cypress swamp,
The ground was low and mucky,
There stood John Bull in martial pomp,
And here stood old Kentucky.

"Oh! Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky!"

After a political campaign of unprecedented bitterness, General
Jackson was elected, receiving one hundred and seventy-eight
electoral votes against eighty-three cast for John Quincy Adams,
and so a new chapter was commenced in the social as well as the
political chronicles of the National Capital. Those who had known
the Presidential successors of Washington as educated and cultivated
gentlemen, well versed in the courtesies of private life and of
ceremonious statesmanship, saw them succeeded by a military chieftain,
whose life had been "a battle and a march," thickly studded with
personal difficulties and duels; who had given repeated evidences
of his disregard of the laws when they stood in the way of his
imperious will; and who, when a United States Senator, had displayed
no ability as a legislator. His election was notoriously the work
of Martin Van Buren, inspired by Aaron Burr, and with his inauguration
was initiated a sordidly selfish political system entirely at
variance with the broad views of Washington and of Hamilton.

It was assumed that every citizen had his price; that neither virtue
nor genius was proof against clever although selfish corruption;
that political honestly was a farce; and that the only way of
governing those knaves who elbowed their way up through the masses
was to rule them by cunning more acute than their own and knavery
more subtle and calculating than theirs.

Before leaving his rural home in Tennessee, General Jackson had
been afflicted by the sudden death of his wife. "Aunt Rachel," as
Mrs. Jackson was called by her husband's personal friends, had
accompanied him to Washington when he was there as a Senator from
Tennessee. She was a short, stout, unattractive, and uneducated
woman, though greatly endeared to General Jackson. While he had
been in the army she had carefully managed h