31, records the
exuberant conversation of six editors, with whom he was shut up for
hours. "The gentlemen of the press," he says, "talked of 'going the
whole hog' for one another, of being 'up to the hub' (nave) for General
Jackson, 'who was all brimstone but the head, and that was aqua-fortis,'
and swore if anyone abused him he ought to be 'set straddle on an
iceberg, and shot through with a streak of lightning.'" Somewhere
between the dignified despair of Daniel Webster, and the adulatory slang
of these gentry we must look for the actual truth about Jackson's
administration. The fears of the statesman were not wholly groundless,
for it is always hard to count in advance upon the tendency of high
office to make men more reasonable. The enthusiasm of the editors had a
certain foundation; at any rate it was a part of their profession to
like stirring times, and they had now the promise of them. After four
years of Adams, preceded by eight years of Monroe, any party of editors
in America, assembled in a stage-coach, would have showered epithets of
endearment on the man who gave such promise in the way of lively items.
No acute journalist could help seeing that a man had a career before him
who was called "Old Hickory" by three-quarters of the nation, and who
made "Hurrah for Jackson!" a cry so potent that it had the force of a
popular decree.

There was, indeed, unbounded room for popular enthusiasm in the review
of Jackson's early career. Born in such obscurity that it is doubtful to
this day whether he was born in South Carolina, as he himself claimed,
or on the North Carolina side of the line, as Mr. Parton thinks, he had
a childhood of poverty and ignorance. He was taken prisoner as a mere
boy during the Revolution, and could never forget that he had been
wounded by a British officer whose boots he had refused to brush.
Afterward, in a frontier community, he was successively farmer,
shopkeeper, law-student, lawyer, district attorney, judge, and
Congressman, being first Representative from Tennessee, and then
Senator, and all before the age of thirty-one. In Congress Albert
Gallatin describes him "as a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with
long locks of hair hanging over his brows and face, and a queue down his
back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment
those of a backwoodsman." He remained, however, but a year or two in all
at Philadelphia--then the seat of national government--and