g to reopen the argument of this question, and
refusing to tread over again the ground already traversed, there is
another and a different task to perform; one which the approaching
termination of President Jackson's administration makes peculiarly
proper at this time, and which it is my privilege, and perhaps my duty,
to execute, as being the suitable conclusion to the arduous contest in
which we have been so long engaged. I allude to the general tenor of his
administration, and to its effect, for good or for evil, upon the
condition of his country. This is the proper time for such a view to be
taken. The political existence of this great man now draws to a close.
In little more than forty days he ceases to be an object of political
hope to any, and should cease to be an object of political hate, or
envy, to all. Whatever of motive the servile and time-serving might have
found in his exalted station for raising the altar of adulation, and
burning the incense of praise before him, that motive can no longer
exist. The dispenser of the patronage of an empire, the chief of this
great confederacy of States, is soon to be a private individual,
stripped of all power to reward, or to punish. His own thoughts, as he
has shown us in the concluding paragraph of that message which is to be
the last of its kind that we shall ever receive from him, are directed
to that beloved retirement from which he was drawn by the voice of
millions of freemen, and to which he now looks for that interval of
repose which age and infirmities require. Under these circumstances, he
ceases to be a subject for the ebullition of the passions, and passes
into a character for the contemplation of history. Historically, then,
shall I view him; and limiting this view to his civil administration, I
demand, where is there a chief magistrate of whom so much evil has been
predicted, and from whom so much good has come? Never has any man
entered upon the chief magistracy of a country under such appalling
predictions of ruin and woe! never has any one been so pursued with
direful prognostications! never has any one been so beset and impeded by
a powerful combination of political and moneyed confederates! never has
any one in any country where the administration of justice has risen
above the knife or the bowstring, been so lawlessly and shamelessly
tried and condemned by rivals and enemies, without hearing, without
defence, without the forms of law and justice! His