an Adams. He had also voted for certain
national roads and other internal improvements, but he had not committed
himself sweepingly to that policy. He doubted the constitutionality of a
national bank. As to the public lands, he favored a liberal policy, with
the object of developing the western country by attracting settlers
rather than raising money to be spent by the government. On the general
question of the powers of the government he stood for a stricter
construction of the Constitution and greater respect for the rights of
the States than Adams believed in. So, notwithstanding Jackson's tariff
views, the mass of the people held him a better representative of
Jeffersonian Democracy than his rival.

But a party is an organization, and not merely a list of principles. It
is, as some one has said, a crowd, and not merely a creed. Jackson's
managers so organized his supporters that they became a party in that
sense much more clearly than in the sense of holding the same views.
Committees were formed all over the country somewhat on the order of the
committees of correspondence of Revolutionary times. Newspapers were set
up to attack the administration and hold the Jackson men together.
Everywhere Jackson was represented as the candidate of the plain people
against the politicians. In all such work Major Lewis was active and
shrewd, and before the end of the campaign, from another quarter of the
union, Jackson won a recruit who was already a past master in all the
lore of party politics. Martin Van Buren was a pupil in the political
school of Aaron Burr, and was recognized as the cleverest politician of
a State in which the sort of politics that is concerned with securing
elections rather than fighting for principles had grown into a science
and an art. New York was then thought a doubtful State, and the support
of Van Buren was of the utmost value.

It is probable that so far as Adams and Jackson differed on questions of
principle and policy, a majority of the people were with Jackson. But it
is also clear that the campaign was fought out as a sort of personal
contest between the Southwestern soldier and the two statesmen whom he
accused of bargain and corruption. It was a campaign of bitter personal
abuse on both sides. Adams, perhaps the most rigidly conscientious
statesman since Washington, was accused of dishonesty, of extravagance,
of riches, of debt, of betraying his old friends, the Federalists, of
trying to br