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temporaries the fame of an intellectual person. Lincoln
conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating
phrases. An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who
knew him, has described him as "embodied intellect."
He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative titles
to respect which have gone far in America to ensure
praise from the public and the historians; for he was
correct and austere, and, which is more, kindly among
his family and his slaves. He is credited, too, with an
observance of high principle in public life, which it might
be difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions. But
the warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as
"heartless, selfish, and a physical coward," and Jackson
could speak generously of an opponent whom he really
knew. His intellect must have been powerful enough, but
it was that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights
in elaborate deductions from principles which he is too
proud to revise; a man, too, who is fearless in accepting
conclusions which startle or repel the vulgar mind; who
is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense,
healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth.
Such men have disciples who reap the disgrace which their
masters are apt somehow to avoid; they give the prestige
of wisdom and high thought to causes which could not
otherwise earn them, A Northern soldier came back
wounded in 1865 and described to the next soldier in the
hospital Calhoun's monument at Charleston. The other
said: "What you saw is not the real monument, but I
have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South.
That is Calhoun's real monument."

.

This man was a Radical, and known as the successor of Jefferson, but his Radicalism showed itself in drawing inspiration solely from the popular catchwords of his own locality. He adored the Union, but it was to be a Union directed by distinguished politicians from the South in a sectional Southern interest. He did not originate, but he secured the strength of orthodoxy and fashion to a tone of sentiment and opinion which for a generation held undisputed supremacy in the heart of

the South. Americans might have seemed at this time to be united in a curiously exultant national self-consciousness, but though there was no sharp division of sections, the boasted glory of the one America meant to many planters in the South the glory of their own settled and free life with their dignified equals round them and their often contented dependents under them. Plain men among them doubtless took things as they were, and, without any particular wish to change them, did not pretend they were perfect. But it is evident that in a widening circle of clever young men in the South the claim of some peculiar virtue for Southern institutions became habitual in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their way of life was beautiful in their eyes. It rested upon slavery. Therefore slavery was a good thing. It was wicked even to criticise it, and it was weak to apologise for it or to pretend that it needed reformation. It was easy and it became apparently universal for the different Churches of the South to prostitute the Word of God in this cause. Later on crude notions of evolution began to get about in a few circles of advanced thought, and these lent themselves as easily to the same purpose. Loose, floating thoughts of this kind might have mattered little. Calhoun, as the recognised wise man of the old South, concentrated them and fastened them upon its people as a creed. Glorification of "our institution at the South " became the main principle of Southern politicians, and any conception that there may ever have been of a task. for constructive statesmanship, in solving the negro problem, passed into oblivion under the influence of his revered reasoning faculty.

But, of his dark and dangerous sort, Calhoun was an able man. He foresaw early that the best weapon of the common interest of the slave States lay in the rights which might be claimed for each individual State against the Union. The idea that a discontented State might secede from the Union was not novel-it had been mooted in New England, during the last war against Great Britain, and, curiously enough, among the rump of the

old Federalist party, but it was generally discounted. Calhoun first brought it into prominence, veiled in an elaborate form which some previous South Carolinian had devised. The occasion had nothing to do with slavery. It concerned Free Trade, a very respectable issue, but so clearly a minor issue that to break up a great country upon it would have gone beyond the limit of solemn frivolity, and Calhoun must be taken to have been forging an implement with which his own section of the States could claim and extort concessions from the Union. A protective tariff had been passed in 1828. The Southern States, which would have to pay the protective duties but did not profit by them, disliked it. Calhoun and others took the intelligible but too refined point, that the powers of Congress under the Constitution authorised a tariff for revenue but not a tariff for a protective purpose. Every State, Calhoun declared, must have the Constitutional right to protect itself against an Act of Congress which it deemed unconstitutional. Let such a State, in special Convention, "nullify" the Act of Congress. Let Congress then, unless it compromised the matter, submit its Act to the people in the form of an Amendment to the Constitution. It would then require a three-fourths majority of all the States to pass the obnoxious Act. Last but not least, if the Act was passed, the protesting State had, Calhoun claimed, the right to secede from the Union.

Controversy over this tariff raged for fully four years, and had a memorable issue. In the course of 1830 the doctrine of "nullification" and "secession " was discussed in the Senate, and the view of Calhoun was expounded by one Senator Hayne. Webster answered him in a speech which he meant should become a popular classic, and which did become so. He set forth his own doctrine of the Union and appealed to national against State loyalty in the most influential oration that was perhaps ever made. "His utterance," writes President Wilson, "sent a thrill through all the East and North which was unmistakably a thrill of triumph. Men were

glad because of what he had said. He had touched
the national self-consciousness, awakened it, and pleased
it with a morning vision of its great tasks and certain
destiny." Later there came in the President, the re-
doubtable Andrew Jackson, the most memorable Presi
dent between Jefferson and Lincoln. He said very little
-only, on Jefferson's birthday he gave the toast, “Our
Federal Union; it must be preserved." But when in
1832, in spite of concessions by Congress, a Convention
was summoned in South Carolina to "nullify" the tariff,
he issued the appropriate orders to the United States
Army, in case such action was carried out, and it is under-
stood that he sent Calhoun private word that he would
be the first man to be hanged for treason. Nullification
quietly collapsed. The North was thrilled still more
than by Webster's oratory, and as not a single other State
showed signs of backing South Carolina, it became thence-
forth the fixed belief of the North that the Union was
recognised as in law indissoluble, as Webster contended.
it was.
None the less the idea of secession had been
planted, and planted in a fertile soil.

General Andrew Jackson, whose other great achievements must now be told, was not an intellectual person, but his ferocious and, in the literal sense, shocking character is refreshing to the student of this period. He had been in his day the typical product of the Westa far wilder West than that from which Lincoln later came. Originally a lawyer, he had won martial fame in fights with Indians and in the celebrated victory over the British forces at New Orleans. He was a sincere Puritan; and he had a courtly dignity of manner; but he was of arbitrary and passionate temper, and he was a sanguinary duellist. His most savage duels, it should be added, concerned the honour of a lady whom he married chivalrously, and loved devotedly to the end. The case that can be made for his many arbitrary acts shows them in some instances to have been justifiable, and shows him in general to have been honest.

When in 1824 Jackson had expected to become

President, and, owing to proceedings which do not now matter, John Quincy Adams, son of a former President, and himself a remarkable man, was made President instead of him, Jackson resolved to overthrow the ruling class of Virginian country gentlemen and Boston city magnates which seemed to him to control Government, and to call into life a real democracy. To this end he created a new party, against which of course an opposition party arose.

Neither of the new parties was in any sense either aristocratic or democratic. "The Democracy," or Democratic party, has continued in existence ever since, and through most of Lincoln's life ruled America. In trying to fix the character of a party in a foreign country we cannot hope to be exact in our portraiture. At the first start, however, this party was engaged in combating certain tendencies to Government interference in business. It was more especially hostile to a National Bank, which Jackson himself regarded as a most dangerous form of alliance between the administration and the richest class. Of the growth of what may be called the money power in American politics he had an intense, indeed prophetic, dread. Martin Van Buren, his friend and successor, whatever else he may have been, was a sound economist of what is now called the old school, and on a financial issue he did what few men in his office have done, he deliberately sacrificed his popularity to his principles. Beyond this the party was and has continued prone, in a manner which we had better not too clearly define, to insist upon the restrictions of the Constitution, whether in the interest of individual liberty or of State rights. This tendency was disguised at the first by the arbitrary action of Jackson's own proceedings, for Jackson alone among Presidents displayed the sentiments of what may be called a popular despot. Its insistence upon State rights, aided perhaps by its dislike of Protection, attracted to it the leading politicians of the South, who in the main dominated its counsels, though later on they liked to do it through Northern instru