. Since then, he had become a stronger
nationalist than ever; besides, he was always ready for a fight, and
whenever he saw a head had the true Irishman's impulse to hit it. So he
responded to the South Carolina nullification ordinance by sending two
men-of-war to Charleston harbor and collecting a force of United States
troops along the Carolina border. "I consider the power to annul a law
of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the
existence of the Union," he wrote; and when a South Carolina
congressman, about to go home, asked the President if he had any
commands for his friends in that state, Jackson retorted:

"Yes, I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your state,
and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in
opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I
can lay my hands on, engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first
tree I can reach."

Whether or not this message was delivered history does not say, but the
whole Nation arose in wrath behind its President, state after state
denounced nullification and disunion, and the South Carolina ordinance
was finally repealed. So the storm passed for the moment. It left
Jackson more of a popular hero than ever; it was as though he had won
another battle of New Orleans. One cannot but wonder what would have
happened had he been acting as President, instead of Buchanan, in those
trying years after 1856.

He retired from the presidency broken in health and fortune, for however
well he took care of the interests of his friends, he was always
careless about his own. The last eight years of his life were spent at
his Tennessee estate, The Hermitage. The end came in 1845, but his name
has remained as a kind of watchword among the common people--a synonym
for rugged honesty, and bluff sincerity. His career is, all in all, by
far the most remarkable of any man who ever held the high office of
President--with one possible exception, that of Abraham Lincoln.

* * * * *

Jackson was one of the most perfect political manipulators and
machine-builders this country ever saw, and he had so perfected his
machine at the close of his second term that he was able to name as his
successor and the heir of his policies, Martin Van Buren, of New York, a
man who had been one of Jackson's most valued lieutenants from the
first, an astute politician, but not remarkable in