in payment
for lands; but it was not thought that this would occasion any great
distress. The people seemed to be satisfied with the "reign" of Andrew
Jackson, and it might have been expected that he would have little
difficulty in placing his friend Van Buren in the high office so soon to
be vacated.

[Illustration: The Presidential Election of 1836, the Popular
Vote by Counties]

It did not prove so easy as it seemed. Calhoun and his followers
were still hostile. In Tennessee, Hugh Lawson White was heading a
serious revolt against Jackson and all his party, and of course New
England was still dissatisfied. Since the great fight between the
President and the Bank in 1833-34, Henry Clay had been welding together
all the forces of the opposition. States-rights men in the South, like
John Tyler, of Virginia, and William C. Preston, of South Carolina, the
conservative forces in the Middle States who were connected with banking
and "big business," and the internal improvements forces of the West
that were still discontented, were all united in a more or less cohesive
party of opposition. A platform they could not risk; in fact, platforms
were not as yet necessary for election, nor was it thought best to
nominate a single pair of candidates and submit their case to the
country. The Whigs, as the opposition now came to be called, arranged a
ticket which Daniel Webster led in the East, which William Henry
Harrison, a popular military hero of the Northwest, headed in that
section, and which Hugh Lawson White, a Jackson man till 1834,
championed in the Southwest. There followed a four-cornered contest
which resulted in the choice of Van Buren by a popular majority of less
than 30,000. Van Buren carried more of the New England States than did
Webster and more of the South than did White, but he lost most of the
West, even Tennessee, which had been the stronghold of his party. The
counties of the old South where Jackson had been most feared gave their
votes to Van Buren, the "safe and sane"; and many New England and
Middle States manufacturers preferred to take their chances with a
masterful organizer of conservative temper, who had been the balance
wheel of the Jackson Administration, to risking all in an election in
the House of Representatives, where the sections would be fighting
fiercely for political and party advantages. The new regime of 1829 was
thus about to be turned into a reaction. There was a common feeling that
V