ary leader that America has known. He was unrivalled in the
art of reconciling conflicting views and managing conflicting wills. We
have already seen him as the triumphant author of the Missouri
Compromise. He was a Westerner, and was supposed to possess great
influence in the new States. Politically he stood for Protection, and
for an interpretation of the Constitution which leaned to Federalism and
away from State Sovereignty. Second only to Clay--if, indeed, second to
him--in abilities was John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina. Calhoun
was not yet the Calhoun of the 'forties, the lucid fanatic of a fixed
political dogma. At this time he was a brilliant orator, an able and
ambitious politician whose political system was unsettled, but tended at
the time rather in a nationalist than in a particularist direction. The
other two candidates were of less intellectual distinction, but each had
something in his favour. William Crawford of Georgia was the favourite
candidate of the State Rights men; he was supposed to be able to command
the support of the combination of Virginia and New York, which had
elected every President since 1800, and there lingered about him a sort
of shadow of the Jeffersonian inheritance. John Quincey Adams of
Massachusetts was the grandson of Washington's successor, but a
professed convert to Democratic Republicanism--a man of moderate
abilities, but of good personal character and a reputation for honesty.
He was Monroe's Secretary of State, and had naturally a certain
hereditary hold on New England.

Into the various intrigues and counter-intrigues of these politicians it
is not necessary to enter here, for from the point of view of American
history the epoch-making event was the sudden entry of a fifth man who
was not a politician. To the confusion of all their arrangements the
great Western State of Tennessee nominated as her candidate for the
Presidency General Andrew Jackson, the deliverer of New Orleans.

Jackson was a frontiersman and a soldier. Because he was a frontiersman
he tended to be at once democratic in temper and despotic in action. In
the rough and tumble of life in the back blocks a man must often act
without careful inquiry into constitutional privileges, but he must
always treat men as men and equals. It has already been noted that men
left to themselves always tend to be roughly democratic, and that even
before the Revolution the English colonies had much of the substance of