or formal law and the
subtleties of State sovereignty he had the contempt of a backwoodsman.
Nor is it without significance that this typical man of the new
democracy will always be associated with the triumph of the spoils
system in national politics. To the new democracy of the West, office
was an opportunity to exercise natural rights as an equal citizen of the
community. Rotation in office served not simply to allow the successful
man to punish his enemies and reward his friends, but it also furnished
the training in the actual conduct of political affairs which every
American claimed as his birthright. Only in a primitive democracy of the
type of the United States in 1830 could such a system have existed
without the ruin of the State. National government in that period was no
complex and nicely adjusted machine, and the evils of the system were
long in making themselves fully apparent.

The triumph of Andrew Jackson marked the end of the old era of trained
statesmen for the Presidency. With him began the era of the popular
hero. Even Martin Van Buren, whom we think of in connection with the
East, was born in a log house under conditions that were not unlike
parts of the older West. Harrison was the hero of the Northwest, as
Jackson had been of the Southwest. Polk was a typical Tennesseean, eager
to expand the nation, and Zachary Taylor was what Webster called a
"frontier colonel." During the period that followed Jackson, power
passed from the region of Kentucky and Tennessee to the border of the
Mississippi. The natural democratic tendencies that had earlier shown
themselves in the Gulf States were destroyed, however, by the spread of
cotton culture, and the development of great plantations in that region.
What had been typical of the democracy of the Revolutionary frontier and
of the frontier of Andrew Jackson was now to be seen in the States
between the Ohio and the Mississippi. As Andrew Jackson is the typical
democrat of the former region, so Abraham Lincoln is the very embodiment
of the pioneer period of the Old Northwest. Indeed, he is the embodiment
of the democracy of the West. How can one speak of him except in the
words of Lowell's great "Commemoration Ode":--

"For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.