and ultimately to
secure him a seat in the Cabinet of President Polk.

If literature and history were beginning to thrive in New England and
the Middle States, painting and sculpture also had their devotees.
Allston and Greenough had won laurels in Boston; Inman and Sully were
making portraits in Philadelphia which well-to-do Middle States lawyers
and Southern planters liked well enough to pay for in good banknotes;
even in far-off Kentucky Joel T. Hart was making the busts of great
American politicians on which his title to distinction was to rest. And
Charleston, never outdone in _ante-bellum_ times, encouraged a real
genius in James de Veaux, the painter, so soon to fall a victim to
tuberculosis. That was a promising religious, literary, and artistic
life, which kept time to the looms of the industrial belt or idealized
the nascent feudalism of the South. But we must turn to the fierce
economic and political struggles about to be reopened in
Washington--struggles in which Americans of that day as well as of this
always take supreme interest.

The change in Massachusetts and Connecticut from a defiant particularism
and an uncompromising free-trade policy, during the short years of 1815
to 1830, to a positive nationalism and emphatic protective program
parallels exactly the change at the same time in South Carolina from
nationalism and a protective tariff to a strict states-rights and an
unbending free-trade system. If Calhoun turned sharp corners in those
years, Webster proved equally agile. The whole life of the East was
being reconstructed, and all classes were adapting themselves to the new
organization. The small farmers, allies in 1804 of Thomas Jefferson and
his up-country democracy, became ancillary to the industrial towns
where they found markets for their products; and the new river and canal
and railroad towns were but the recent creations of the new order. With
the exception of a few remote counties and certain old-fashioned
merchants, all New England and the Middle States ranged themselves
around the dominant industrial masters and presented an almost solid
front to the Southern and Western combination which had swept the
country in 1828. There was no doubt that Adams, Webster, and Clay would
renew the fight in time to make an issue in 1832.

And their case was by no means hopeless. In the electoral college of
1832 these Northeastern States would cast 131 of the total 286 votes. If
the industrial force