ops who had beaten Napoleon." The battle of New
Orleans made Jackson an international character, and the West was ready
to crown him a hero and a savior of the nation. Nor did his arbitrary
conduct in the Seminole War, or later, when he was Governor of Florida,
injure him in a region where Indians, Spaniards, and Englishmen had few
rights which an American need respect. The attacks of Henry Clay in the
House of Representatives, and of William H. Crawford in the Cabinet,
were regarded as political maneuvers. When, therefore, Jackson offered
himself in 1823 as a candidate for the Presidency, most Western men
welcomed him, fearing only that his age and his delicate health, of
which he had said too much in public, might cut him off before he could
render his country the great service of which they considered him
capable. The politicians, especially those who followed Henry Clay, did
their utmost to defeat him, and the votes of the West were divided
almost evenly between the two backwoods rivals. But when it became clear
in 1825 that Speaker Clay of the House of Representatives had added his
influence to that of John Quincy Adams in order to prevent Jackson from
winning, Western men everywhere made his cause their cause. "Let the
people rule" became a battle-cry which was taken up in every frontier
State from Georgia to Illinois.

It was time that the people devoted more attention to public affairs;
they had in fact well-nigh abdicated. In Virginia, with a white
population of 625,000, only 15,000 had voted in the election of 1824; in
Pennsylvania, whose population was over a million, only some 47,000 had
taken the trouble to go to the polls; while in Massachusetts, where the
"favorite son" motive operated, just one man in nineteen exercised the
right of suffrage. Government had become the business of "gentlemen" and
of those who made a specialty of politics. The old Jeffersonian machine,
organized as a popular protest against aristocracy and the "money
power," had itself become aristocratic, and it had ceased to represent
the democracy of the United States; and the democracy had lost interest
in its own affairs.

When Clay, the Westerner and long-time opponent of Adams and the New
England element in politics, executed his surprising somersault in
February, 1825, and thus made the eastern leader President and then
himself became Secretary of State, occasion was given to a second
Jefferson to arouse the people to a sense of t