ed a never-failing
hostility to "Clay and his President"; but Thomas H. Benton, of
Missouri, was the most effective, perhaps, of all these men who were
bent on the overthrow of Adams and Clay.

They kept the "bargain and sale" charge alive till the very day of the
election. Benton urged on every possible occasion the adoption of
constitutional amendments forbidding the President to appoint members of
Congress to office, restricting the presidential term to four years
without possibility of reelection, and limiting the powers and
jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. He also kept the Western squatters on
the public lands closely attached to him by promising that if he ever
came to power their rights to the farms they had taken without leave
should be confirmed by law. Nor did he forget to denounce Adams for
"wantonly giving away Texas" in the negotiations with Spain in 1819.
Every movement of the Government was combated at every point and
defeated if possible. Van Buren, Calhoun, and Benton were an able trio,
and they resorted for four years to every possible device to discredit
the President and his Secretary of State and at the same time to secure
the election of Andrew Jackson.

Duff Green, of Missouri, was brought to Washington to establish and edit
_The Telegraph_, the organ of the opposition which began operations in
1826. It gave currency to the campaign literature and educated the
people in the cause of the West. Adams was an aristocrat; he lived
sumptuously every day at the public expense; he did not associate with
the people; and he aped the courts of Europe, where he had spent so much
of his life. The people of the South and West reached the point where
they could believe anything against John Quincy Adams. No other
President of the United States has ever been so shamefully treated, save
one, and that one was Martin Van Buren, the man who was leading the
onslaughts of 1828.

Adams and Clay were helpless; it was difficult for them to secure
popular allies or get a fair hearing. Richard Rush, the son of the
Jeffersonian radical of 1800, was made candidate for the Vice-Presidency
in the hope of winning Pennsylvania; Clay did his utmost to stem the
tide in the West; Daniel Webster was, of course, on the side of Adams;
William Wirt and James Barbour stood up bravely in Virginia for a doomed
cause. But these earnest and patriotic men could not rally the normal
strength of the conservatives, for the Southern planters