the air with
caricatures and lampoons, and bringing victory to the drilled and
disciplined forces which were now to follow, for half a score of
years, the fortunes of the New Orleans hero. From the moment Jackson
became the standard-bearer, the crowds were with him. Adams was
represented as cold and personally unpopular; Jackson as frank,
cordial in manner, and bravely chivalric. When everything in favour of
Adams was carefully summed up and admitted, his ability as a writer,
as a lawyer, as a diplomatist, and as a statesman, the people,
fascinated by the distinguished traits of character and the splendour
of the victory at New Orleans, threw their hats into the air for
Andrew Jackson. The eloquence of Williams could carry Columbia County;
Porter, ever popular and interesting, could sweep the Niagara
frontier; and Gross, with an illuminated rhetoric that lives to this
day in the memory of men who heard their fathers talk about it, had no
trouble in Essex; but from the Hudson to Lake Oneida the Jackson party
may be said to have carried everything by storm, electing its ticket
by over four thousand majority in New York City, and securing nearly
all the senatorial districts and the larger part of the Assembly. So
overwhelming was the victory that Van Buren had no trouble at the
opening of the Twentieth Congress to defeat the re-election of John W.
Taylor for speaker.

As the time approached for nominating a governor to lead the campaign
of 1828, Van Buren realised that the anti-masonic sentiment, which had
been rapidly growing since the abduction of William Morgan, had
developed into an influence throughout the western part of the State
that threatened serious trouble. Morgan was a native of Virginia, born
in 1776, a man of fair education, and by trade a stone-mason. Little
is known of his life until 1821, when he resided first in York,
Canada, and, a year later, in Rochester, New York, where he worked at
his trade. Then he drifted to LeRoy, in Genesee County, becoming an
active Free Mason. Afterward, he moved back to Rochester, and then to
Batavia, where he sought out David C. Miller, a printer, who agreed to
publish whatever secrets of Free Masonry Morgan would reveal. The
work, done by night and on Sundays, was finally interrupted on
September 11, 1826, by Morgan's arrest, on a trifling criminal charge,
and transfer to Canandaigua for examination. His acquittal was
immediately followed by a second arrest upon a civil p