which had been burned down. He chose a high hill on the plantation, from
which, across the surrounding country, the town of Charlottesville could
be seen miles away. He named the estate “Monticello,” the Italian word
for “little mountain.”
About the time the Jeffersons were married the whole country was stirred
by the Stamp Act and other taxes demanded by England of the American
colonies. These taxes seemed unjust, because the people were not allowed
the right to send men from America to help make the laws which they had
to obey. Jefferson wrote a pamphlet on the subject, which he called “A
Summary View of the Rights of British America.” In it he said, “The God
who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”
When the people of the colonies in America were fully aroused, they sent
men to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia to decide what to do
about the unjust acts of the British king and his wrong advisers. George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee were among the men,
called delegates, sent from “Old Virginia.”
One day in the Congress, Richard Henry Lee arose and made this motion:
“_Resolved_, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to
be, free and independent states.”
After discussing Lee’s resolution for three days, the
[Illustration: THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, THAT
HISTORIC DOCUMENT OF WHICH JEFFERSON WAS THE AUTHOR.]
Congress voted to have a statement drawn up to send to King George the
Third, declaring that the people of the United Colonies could not stand
wrong treatment any longer. Thomas Jefferson was appointed chairman of a
committee of five to write this paper, which came to be called the
Declaration of Independence. This is one of the four greatest legal
papers ever written. In it were these lines, which will be repeated as
long as there are people living in the world who love liberty:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.”
“We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our
sacred honor.”
When the War for Independence was won, Thomas Jefferson was sent to
France to represent the young American republic. Then when Washington
was President he was called home to be Secretary of State. After
Washington died, Thomas Jefferson was elected the third President of the
United States. Instead of being fond of show in using the power given to
him by the people, Thomas Jefferson was very simple in his tastes. When
he came to be inaugurated President he did not drive through the streets
of Washington in a coach with six horses and outriders and escorts, as
other Presidents had done, but walked with a few friends from his
boarding-house to the new Capitol, then building, where he delivered his
Inaugural Address and took the oath of office.
This so-called “Jeffersonian simplicity” seemed strange then, because he
was a man of wealth and lived in a beautiful mansion. Many people did
not like his simple ways. They thought the President of the United
States should show more dignity. The minister from Great Britain was
offended because, when he came to present his respects and those of the
king of England, President Jefferson received him in a dressing-gown and
slippers and heavy yarn socks. But the sensible people thought so much
of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence that they did not
mind what kind of stockings Thomas Jefferson wore.
While he was President, Jefferson saw that the country’s interests would
be hampered while New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River,
belonged to France. It was like having another nation own and control
the south door of the United States. So Jefferson sent men to purchase
from the French government New Orleans and the right of way out of the
Mississippi. Napoleon was then in power, and as he needed money to carry
on his war with England, he offered to sell to the United States, for
fifteen million dollars, not only New Orleans, but all the western
country which France had claimed since the days of La Salle and other
explorers. This was a great bargain and the men whom President Jefferson
had sent bought the land without waiting to hear from home. This was
called the Louisiana Purchase, and the people were more than glad to
approve what the President had done.
The expedition of Lewis and Clark was sent out by Jefferson to explore
and make maps of the Louisiana Purchase.
So Thomas Jefferson not only wrote the Declaration of Independence but
he was the means of doubling the size and wealth of the country, making
it extend from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the
Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
ANDREW JACKSON, AMERICA’S MOST POPULAR HERO
About ten years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence,
two Irish linen weavers, Andrew and Elizabeth Jackson, came across the
Atlantic to a backwoods settlement in North Carolina. There the young
settlers built a cabin, but before they had lived long in their rude
little home, Andrew Jackson died, leaving his wife with two small sons,
Hugh and Robert. The young widow went to live with a sick sister a few
miles away, and when the third baby boy was born to her here, she named
him Andrew for his dead father. The house in which little Andrew Jackson
was born was so near the boundary line between North and South Carolina
that years afterwards both states claimed him as their son.
Elizabeth Jackson had to keep house for her sister to support herself
and her three little boys. Andrew was in his tenth year when the War for
Independence broke out in the north. Three years later the British came
to fight near the Jacksons’ home in the south. Hugh, the oldest, now a
lad of seventeen, fought in the battle of Stono, and died, soon after,
of heat and exhaustion.
Then the British troops came nearer, and Widow Jackson, with Robert and
Andrew, was driven from her poor home. These terrible experiences
developed in the tall, red-haired, freckled, thirteen-year-old
Scotch-Irish lad a deep hatred of the “red-coats,” as the British
soldiers were called.
As if Andrew had not already reasons enough for hating his enemies, a
squad of dragoons surprised him with his brother Robert and a cousin,
Lieutenant Thomas Crawford, at the home of the Crawfords, where they had
brought Tom, wounded and ill, for his mother’s care. After capturing
the young American “soldiers three,” the British cavalrymen broke the
Crawfords’ dishes, tore their clothing, ripped open feather beds,
insulted the frightened mother and abused the little children. Then, as
if for a crowning insult, the British officer ordered Andy to clean his
boots. The young Irish soldier drew himself up and said proudly,
“Sir, I am not a servant, but a prisoner of war, and I claim to be
treated as such.”
The angry dragoon struck at the youth’s head with his saber. Andy threw
up his hand and saved his own life by breaking the force of the stroke,
but received deep cuts on his forehead and hand. He wore the two scars
to his dying day.
Andrew’s brother Robert was commanded to perform the same low service
and refused with the same proud spirit; he also received a sword-cut on
his head which nearly killed him. The two Jackson youths were then taken
away to a prison pen at Camden, South Carolina, where American soldiers
were treated like beasts and where many were already dying of smallpox.
While the Jackson brothers were in this prison, a battle was fought near
by. Young Andrew whittled a hole through a board with an old razor, so
that he could watch the battle that was raging around them.
When the poor mother heard that her wounded sons were confined in a
filthy prison where they were exposed to smallpox, she walked forty
miles to Camden and managed to have them exchanged for some British
soldiers the Americans had captured. Begging the use of two horses, she
placed Robert on one of them, as he was very ill with smallpox. She rode
the other horse to hold her son in his saddle; and young Andrew, “weak
and wounded, sick and sore,” staggered along behind them on foot.
Robert died two days after reaching home, but Andrew recovered after a
long and severe illness.
After nursing her only remaining son back to health, that brave,
unselfish mother heard that many American soldiers were sick and dying
in the British prison ship in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
She walked more than one hundred and fifty miles to nurse and help them
as she had nursed her own sons. She took the ship fever and died, giving
her devoted life for freedom and for country.
So Andrew Jackson, now a tall, thin youth of fourteen with a “shock of
sandy hair,” was without father, mother, brothers, money, or near
friends--but with a bitter grudge against Britain as the cause of all
his troubles and sorrows. His life was made better by his deep love of
his brave, noble mother’s memory. When he grew up and became the most
popular man in the United States, Andrew Jackson often said with a smile
of pride:
“_That_ I learned from my good old mother!”
Andrew Jackson had but few chances to go to school, and then only a few
weeks at a time. He learned the saddler’s trade and studied when he
could take the time from hard work. Little as he learned from books, he
knew more than most of his neighbors. He taught school sometimes to add
to what he earned at his trade, so that he could study law. Even North
Carolina, wild as that new country was, became too “civilized” for
Andrew Jackson, and he crossed the mountains into Tennessee and settled
at Nashville, where he began to practise law. In that rough country he
soon became a leader. In the midst of the wild life in which the chief
“sports” were horse-racing, Indian shooting, fighting duels, and the
like, young “Judge” Jackson was “hail-fellow, well met!” He soon was
elected to Congress, but he found life at the capital entirely too
“genteel” for him. When the southern Indians went on the warpath and
massacred white settlers, General Jackson and his troops from Tennessee
drove them from place to place and killed nearly all the savage
murderers. He was called the Hero of the War of 1812, because he won the
Battle of New Orleans, the greatest land victory in that war.
The people loved General Jackson because he was a bluff, warm-hearted
man, and because, whether he fought with the Indians or the British, “he
thrashed ’em every time!” He was named “Old Hickory” because he was
about as tough in fiber and as rough on the outside as the hickory tree.
He was probably the most popular hero that ever lived in America, for
more boys were named Andrew Jackson than even George Washington or
Abraham Lincoln. January eighth, the date of Jackson’s victory at New
Orleans, is still celebrated as Jackson Day. Jackson was called “the Man
of the People,” including the “rough and ready” people of the great, new
west; Jefferson represented the more educated classes; while Washington
was the man of the upper class of people. Still, Jackson stood for the
white people only. It was Abraham Lincoln who came thirty years later
and stood for all the people, black and white.
General Jackson was elected and carried to the White House by a great
wave of popularity. The people were so pleased to have him for their
President that they crowded into the White House and stood on the new
satin covered furniture in their muddy boots. They broke the china and
glassware and spilled punch on the velvet carpets. In their
[Illustration: GENERAL JACKSON AT THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS.
_From the painting by D. M. Carter_]
frantic efforts to shake hands with their hero-president they nearly
crushed him to death.
President Jackson treated his political enemies as he did the Indians
and the English. He turned thousands of men out of office and appointed
his friends in their places. “To the victors belong the spoils,” he
said, but most people to-day believe the warlike President had the wrong
idea in treating public service as “spoils of war.” After serving his
country as President, Andrew Jackson lived at the Hermitage, a beautiful
mansion he had built near Nashville, Tennessee.
When the aged ex-President knew he was dying, he called his friends and
slaves around his bed and told them he wanted them all to meet him in
heaven. When the simple but grand old hero died, they found his dead
wife’s miniature close to his heart where he had worn it for many years.
Then they remembered that, rough and violent as he often had been with
men, he had never spoken a cross or cruel word to his wife or any of his
own household.
“The bravest are the tenderest.”
WEBSTER, CLAY, CALHOUN, THREE GREAT CHAMPIONS IN CONGRESS
“There were giants in those days,” a hundred years ago in the United
States of America; not giants in body, but in mind and heart. Besides
the Presidents and the generals in the War of 1812 and the Indian wars,
the greatest men in America were Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, who were in
Congress together. Daniel Webster was the man of New England, Henry
Clay of the west, and John C. Calhoun of the south.
Daniel Webster was born among the hills of New Hampshire, the ninth of
the ten children of his father. He had a huge head, a high forehead, and
great, deep, inquiring eyes. Webster once said that he did not remember
when he could not read the Bible. He learned chapter after chapter of it
by heart and remembered them all his life.
[Illustration: CLAY, CALHOUN AND WEBSTER, “THE STATESMEN OF THE
COMPROMISE.”
(From left to right.)
_From the painting by A. Tholey_]
Daniel’s father lived on a rocky farm in New Hampshire and had a hard
time to educate his growing family. He was called Captain Webster
because he had been an officer in the War for Independence. His children
used to delight in hearing about General Washington. After Daniel grew
to be a great man he was proud to tell how the Father of his Country had
trusted his father. Once he said,
“I should rather have it said upon my father’s tombstone that he had
guarded the person of George Washington and was worthy of such a trust,
than to have carved upon it the greatest title that the world could
give.”
Captain Webster said to his son one day after a gentleman who was riding
by had stopped to speak to him:
“Dan, that man beat me by a few votes when I ran against him for
Congress, and all because he had a better education. For that reason I
intend you shall have a good education, and I hope to see you work your
way up to Congress.”
Daniel’s next older brother’s name was Ezekiel. He was larger and
stronger than Daniel who, because of his poor health, was not expected
to do hard work on the farm. This gave Daniel time to read and improve
his mind. Yet he was not allowed to be idle; he was expected to do
“chores” and other light work about the place. One day Captain Webster
went away, after giving both boys a certain task to do while he was
gone. The lads, boy-like, spent the day having a good time, so that when
their father came home he found the work not done.
“Zeke,” he said sternly, “what have you been doing all day?”
“Nothing,” said Zeke sheepishly.
“And what have _you_ been doing, Dan?” asked Captain Webster.
“Helping Zeke!” said the younger boy with a grin.
After that when any one was idle, it was said that he was “helping
Zeke.”
When the time came for Father Webster to send Daniel away to school, as
he had promised, the younger boy said he would not go unless Zeke could
have the same chance. So Captain Webster mortgaged the farm to raise the
money to educate both boys. Even then the sons had to stay out of school
at times to earn money to help themselves through the academy and
college.
In mental work Daniel proved stronger and better able to earn money than
his older brother. A good story is told of Daniel’s coming, after
teaching a term of school, to see Ezekiel at college and giving his
brother one hundred dollars--nearly all he had earned, keeping only
three dollars for himself until he could earn more. That was Daniel
Webster’s best way of “helping Zeke.”
Daniel was the more brilliant of the two, so that he was through college
as soon as his brother, though he had not spent so much time there.
Their father explained one difference between the two sons:
“Ezekiel could not tell half he knew; but Daniel could tell more than he
knew.”
By the time Daniel was out of college his father had become a county
judge, and was able to offer his youngest son a position as clerk of the
court at fifteen hundred dollars a year, which was a large salary for
that time and place. But Daniel refused the place, saying: “I intend to
be a lawyer myself and not to spend my life jotting down other men’s
doings.”
“‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,’” said Judge Webster,
reminding his son that there were already too many lawyers for them all
to make a good living.
“There’s always room at the top,” said young Daniel Webster.
He went to Boston to study law, and his fame as attorney and orator
spread far and wide. The two sons soon paid their father’s debts, and
proud old Judge Webster soon saw his son Daniel not only in Congress,
but acknowledged to be the greatest man in the Senate.
Ezekiel Webster did not have so brilliant a career as his younger
brother, but Daniel always yielded to “Zeke’s” better judgment, even in
the greatest public affairs. Ezekiel did not live to see Daniel’s
highest success, and it was said that a new look of sadness came into
the great Webster’s face, and never left it, after hearing of “Zeke’s”
sudden death.
Although Daniel Webster was not six feet tall, his high, full, square
brow and dignified bearing made him seem a giant. Carlyle, the great
Scottish philosopher, met him in London and said: “Webster is a walking
cathedral!”
When Daniel Webster was still a small boy on his father’s “rock-ribb’d”
farm in New Hampshire, a thin, homely youth of fifteen came into the
Court of Chancery in Richmond, Virginia. He was so awkward and bashful
and dressed so queerly that the clerks winked at one another and
snickered behind his back. That youth, whose name was Henry Clay, had
come to Richmond from a low, swampy region called “the Slashes,” where
he lived with his widowed mother. Because he used to ride a poor old
horse to a mill near his home to get a little corn ground, Henry Clay
was afterward called “the Mill Boy of the Slashes.”
Henry’s mother married again and moved out to Kentucky when it was still
a western wilderness. Young Clay stayed in Virginia to study law and was
soon admired because of his brightness. He improved his time, as well as
his appearance, so that when he was eighteen, he was a popular orator
and “the bright, particular star” of the Richmond Debating Society.
Then, instead of finding “room higher up” in his home state, Henry went
west to be near his mother, and to “grow up with the country.” The
twenty-one-year-old attorney hung out his sign in the new and growing
town of Lexington, Kentucky. He was good-natured and thoughtful. He
understood law very well for so young a man. As he was an eloquent
speaker, he became a successful attorney. He married and settled down on
a 600-acre estate which he named “Ashland.” This estate is still known
all over the world as “the home of Henry Clay.”
The year before the War of 1812 began, Henry Clay was sent to Congress
from Kentucky and was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives.
He raised his eloquent voice against England and bore a strong part in
supporting President Madison in carrying on the war. He was so earnest
in this that he was known as a leader of “the War Hawks.” When the war
was over, Henry Clay was one of five men sent to Europe by the United
States to arrange the terms of peace with Great Britain--a peace which
has not been broken for more than a hundred years.
Henry Clay was three times a candidate for the presidency. He had done
so much for the country that he had made enemies of many whom he had to
oppose at different times. So each time he was defeated by a man not
nearly so great or powerful, but for whom more people were willing to
vote.
While Webster and Clay were leaders in Congress there was great
excitement because that body passed a tariff law which the southern
people did not like. Many of the southern leaders, especially those of
South Carolina, said that Congress had no right to pass such a law and
that each state might declare the objectionable law null and void or of
no effect within its borders. Such action by a state was called
“nullification.” There was talk that some of the states would withdraw
from the Union if the President tried to enforce the hated law. Such
withdrawal on the part of a state was called “secession.”
About the time these mutterings of disunion were in the air, Robert Y.
Hayne, a great orator from South Carolina, made a strong speech in the
Senate of the United States, maintaining the right of his state to
“nullify” and withdraw from the Union. Daniel Webster, the champion of
the Union, delivered one of the greatest appeals ever made by any
orator, in his famous reply to Hayne. It closed with these now familiar
words:
“Let my last feeble and lingering glance behold the glorious ensign
of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still
full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their
original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star
obscured; bearing for its motto no such miserable question as,
‘What is all this worth?’ or those other words of delusion and
folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards;’ but everywhere, spread
all over in characters of living light, blazing in all its ample
folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, that other
sentiment, dear to every true American heart--_Liberty and Union,
now and forever, one and inseparable_.”
The greatest leader in the south and champion of the right of his state,
South Carolina, was John C. Calhoun. He also was an eloquent speaker. He
declared in the Senate of the United States, in speaking of the tariff
law meant to tax goods which people needed, “We look upon it as a dead
law, null and void, and will not obey it.” South Carolina nullified the
tariff law and threatened to secede from the Union.
General Andrew Jackson, the bluff old Indian fighter and hero of the War
of 1812, was then President. He declared, “The Union must and shall be
preserved!” John C. Calhoun and all others acquainted with “Old
Hickory,” as the President was nicknamed, knew that he meant just what
he said. It seemed that civil war was about to begin when Henry Clay,
who loved the Union, averted the danger by proposing a plan of
compromise which both sides could accept.
THE KIND HEART OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Little Abe Lincoln lived in a log cabin in Kentucky. When he was seven,
his family moved across the Ohio River into Indiana, and lived all
winter in an open shed called a “half-faced camp,” before his father
built a better cabin, with bare earth for its floor. Tom Lincoln, Abe’s
father, was “a mighty hunter.” He liked to shoot game better than the
hard work of clearing land and farming. He thought Abe was timid because
he did not like to kill harmless animals or see them suffer.
During the fourteen years Abe lived in southern Indiana, he went to
school a few weeks at a time--less than a year in all. A girl who went
to school when he did, used to tell, after she became an old woman, that
Abe’s first “composition” was against cruelty to animals. She always
remembered how he read this sentence in it: “An ant’s life is as sweet
to it as ours is to us.”
One day Abe caught several lads laughing at a turtle as it moved slowly
about, showing, as well as a dumb animal could, the misery it was in.
For there were burning coals on its back, and the biggest boy stood by
with a smoking shingle in his hand. This showed Abe how the hot coals
came upon the terrapin’s back. Snatching the shingle from the big
bully’s hand, he brushed them off and began
[Illustration: THE BOY LINCOLN READING BY THE FIRELIGHT IN THE LOG CABIN
IN WHICH HE WAS BORN.]
to paddle the cruel boy with it, calling him a cowardly fellow for
hurting a helpless turtle.