h
General Winfield Scott, whom, in 1817, he had styled an "assassin," a
"hectoring bully," and an "intermeddling pimp and spy of the War
Office." He made friends with Colonel Thomas H. Benton, with whom he
had fought in the streets of Nashville, while he still carried in his
body a bullet received in that bloody affray. With Henry Clay, too, he
resumed friendly intercourse, met him twice at dinner-parties, rode
and exchanged visits with him, and attended one of the Speaker's
Congressional dinners.

When next these party chieftains met, in the spring of 1825, it was
about to devolve upon the House of Representatives to decide which of
three men should be the next President,--Jackson, Adams, or Crawford.
They exchanged visits as before; Mr. Clay being desirous, as he said,
to show General Jackson that, in the vote which he had determined to
give, he was influenced only by public considerations. No reader needs
to be informed that Mr. Clay and his friends were able to decide the
election, and that they decided it in favor of Mr. Adams. We believe
that Mr. Clay was wrong in so doing. As a Democrat he ought, we think,
to have been willing to gratify the plurality of his fellow-citizens,
who had voted for General Jackson. His motives we fully believe to
have been disinterested. Indeed, it was plainly intimated to him that,
if he gave the Presidency to General Jackson, General Jackson would
make him his heir apparent, or, in other words, his Secretary of
State.

The anger of General Jackson at his disappointment was not the blind
and wild fury of his earlier days; it was a deeper, a deadlier wrath,
which he governed and concealed in order to wreak a feller vengeance.
On the evening of the day on which the election in the House occurred
there was a levee at the Presidential mansion, which General Jackson
attended. Who, that saw him dart forward and grasp Mr. Adams cordially
by the hand, could have supposed that he then entirely believed that
Mr. Adams had stolen the Presidency from him by a corrupt bargain with
Mr. Clay? Who could have supposed that he and his friends had been,
for fourteen days, hatching a plot to blast the good name of Mr. Adams
and Mr. Clay, by spreading abroad the base insinuation that Clay had
been bought over to the support of Adams by the promise of the first
place in the Cabinet? Who could have supposed that, on his way home to
Tennessee, while the newspapers were paragraphing his magnanimity in
defe