ndred and seventy-eight votes to
Adams's eighty-three. Calhoun was again chosen Vice-President.

The poor boy had won his way to the White House, but it was a worn old
man, bowed down with a heavy sorrow, who journeyed across the mountains
to take the great prize. The cruel campaign scandal about his marriage
had aggravated a heart trouble from which his wife had long suffered.
She died in December, and his grief was appalling to those who gathered
at The Hermitage to do honor to "Aunt Rachel." It was not in Jackson's
nature, as indeed it would not have been in the nature of many men, to
forget, in his grief, the enemies who had helped to cause it. His old
age, like his youth, was to be cursed with hatred and the thought of
revenge.

VI

THE WHITE HOUSE

March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson became President of the United States. A
great crowd of strange-looking men went to see him inaugurated. "They
really seem to think," wrote Webster, "that the country has been rescued
from some great danger." Whoever else may have thought so, Jackson
certainly held that opinion. As his wont was, he saw the danger and the
villainy which he thought himself commissioned to destroy in the person
of a man; and that man was Henry Clay. Martin Van Buren was to succeed
Clay as Secretary of State in the new Cabinet, but he did not reach
Washington until after the 4th of March. Jackson accordingly sent his
friend, Colonel Hamilton, of New York, to the State Department, ordering
him to take charge there the instant he should hear the gun which was
to announce that the new President had taken the oath of office.

Jackson and Clay were, in fact, the leaders of the two parties into
which the old Republican party was now divided. Their rise to leadership
meant that a new set of public men and a new set of questions had come
to the front; it meant a more thoroughgoing experiment of democracy than
had yet been tried in America. Adams's administration is properly
considered to have been the last of one series and Jackson's the first
of another. Under the earlier Presidents, national affairs were
committed mainly to a few trained statesmen, the people simply approving
or disapproving the men and the measures brought before them, but not of
themselves putting forward candidates for the higher offices or in any
wise initiating policies. The rule of the people was thus a passive sort
of rule, a rule by consent. But with the wide prevalence of manhoo