to be on their side, they were quickly undeceived. When Jefferson's
birthday, April 13, was observed in Washington, as it had been for
twenty years, Jackson sent the following toast: "OUR FEDERAL UNION: IT
MUST BE PRESERVED." He wrote to the citizens of Charleston, "Every
enlightened citizen must know that a separation, could it be effected,
would begin with civil discord, and end in colonial dependence on a
foreign power, and obliteration from the list of nations." He said, "If
this thing goes on, our country will be like a bag of meal with both
ends open. Pick it up in the middle or endwise, it will run out."
Still, South Carolina was not to be deterred, with the eloquent Calhoun
as her leader, and the Nullification Ordinance was passed November 24,
1832. At once the governor was authorized to accept the service of
volunteers. Medals were struck bearing the words, "John C. Calhoun,
First President of the Southern Confederacy."
By the time South Carolina was ready to break the laws, another person
was ready to enforce them. Jackson at once sent General Scott to take
command at Charleston, with gun-boats close by, and sent also an earnest
and eloquent protest to the seceding State. Public meetings were held in
the large cities of the North. The tariff was modified at the next
session of Congress, but the disunion doctrines were allowed to grow
till thirty years later, when they bore the bitter fruit of civil war.
When Jackson was asked, years afterward, what he would have done with
Calhoun and the nullifiers if they had continued, he replied, "Hung them
as high as Haman. They should have been a terror to traitors to all
time, and posterity would have pronounced it the best act of my life."
When difficulties arose about the Cherokees of Georgia, he removed them
to the Indian Territory; a harsh measure it seemed, but perhaps not
harder for the tribes than to have attempted to live among hostile
whites. When the French king neglected to pay the five million dollars
agreed upon for injuries done to our shipping, Jackson recommended to
make reprisals on French merchantmen, and the money was paid. The
national debt was paid under Jackson, who believed rightly that this, as
well as every other kind of debt, is a curse. The Eaton affair showed
his loyalty to friends. John H. Eaton, Secretary of War, had married
the widow of a purser in the Navy, formerly the daughter of a
tavern-keeper in Washington. Her conduct had caused criticism, and the
ladies of the Cabinet would not associate with her--even though
President Jackson tried every means in his power to compel it, as Eaton
was his warm friend.
When the eight years of presidential life were over, Jackson sent his
farewell address to the people of the country, who had idolized him, and
whom he had loved, he said, "with the affection of a son," and retired
to the Hermitage. The people of Nashville met him with outstretched arms
and tearful faces. He was seventy years old, _their_ President, and he
had come home to live and die with them.
He was now through with politics, and wanted to carry out _her_ wishes,
to join the little Hermitage church. The night of decision was full of
meditation and prayer. One morning in 1843, the church was crowded to
see the ex-President make a public confession of the Christian religion.
He went home to read his Bible more carefully than ever--he had never
read less than three chapters daily for thirty-five years, such is the
influence of early education received at a mother's knee.
The following year, 1844, Commodore Elliot offered the sarcophagus which
he brought from Palestine, believed to have contained the remains of the
Roman Emperor, Alexander Severus, to President Jackson for his final
resting-place.
A letter of cordial thanks was returned, with the words, "I cannot
consent that my mortal body shall be laid in a repository prepared for
an emperor or a king. My republican feelings and principles forbid it;
the simplicity of our system of government forbids it.... I have
prepared an humble depository for my mortal body beside that wherein
lies my beloved wife, where, without any pomp or parade, I have
requested, when my God calls me to sleep with my fathers, to be laid."
The May of 1845 found General Jackson feeble and emaciated, but still
deeply interested in his country, writing letters to President Polk and
other statesmen about Texas, hoping ever to avert war if possible. "If
not," he said, "let war come. There will be patriots enough in the land
to repel foreign aggression, come whence it may, and to maintain
sacredly our just rights and to perpetuate our glorious constitution and
liberty, and to preserve our happy Union." He made his will, bequeathing
all his property to his adopted son, because, said he, "If _she_ were
alive, she would wish him to have it all, and to me her wish is law."
On Sunday, June 8, 1845, the family and servants gathered about the
great man, who was dying at the age of seventy-eight, having fought
against wounds and disease all his life. "My dear children," he said,
"do not grieve for me; it is true I am going to leave you; I am well
aware of my situation. I have suffered much bodily pain, but my
sufferings are but as nothing compared with that which our blessed
Saviour endured upon that accursed cross, that all might be saved who
put their trust in him.... I hope and trust to meet you all in Heaven,
both white and black--both white and black." Then he kissed each one,
his eyes resting last, affectionately, upon his granddaughter Rachel,
named for his wife, and closely resembling her in loveliness of
character; then death came.
Two days before he died, he said, "Heaven will be no Heaven to me if I
do not meet my wife there." Who can picture that meeting? He used to
say, "All I have achieved--fame, power, everything--would I exchange, if
she could be restored to me for a moment." How blessed must have been
the restoration, not "for a moment," but for eternity!
The lawn at the Hermitage was crowded with the thousands who came to
attend the funeral. From the portico, the minister spoke from the words,
"These are they which came out of great tribulation, and washed their
robes white in the blood of the Lamb."
All over the country, public meetings were held in honor of the
illustrious dead; the man who had said repeatedly, "I care nothing about
clamors; I do precisely what I think just and right."
"He had had honors beyond anything which his own heart had ever
coveted," says Prof. William G. Sumner, in his life of Jackson. "His
successes had outrun his ambition. He had held more power than any
other American had ever possessed. He had been idolized by the great
majority of his countrymen, and had been surfeited with adulation."
Politicians sometimes sneered about his "kitchen cabinet" at Washington,
the devoted friends who influenced him but did not hold official
position, for, self-reliant though he was to a marvellous degree, he was
neither afraid nor ashamed to be influenced by those who loved him. He
was absolutely sincere and unselfish. He hated intensely, and loved
intensely; with an affection as unchanging as his adamantine will.
Patriotic, determined, energetic, and heroic, he attained success where
others would have failed. He illustrated Emerson's words, "The man who
stands by himself, the universe will stand by him also." Francis P.
Blair, his devoted friend, used to say, "Of all the men I have known,
Andrew Jackson was the one most entirely sufficient for himself." During
his presidency, the steamboat which once conveyed him and his party down
the Chesapeake was unseaworthy, and one of the men exhibited much alarm.
"You are uneasy," said the general; "you never sailed with _me_ before,
I see."
As a soldier, he was a brave, wise, skilful leader; as a statesman,
honest, earnest, fearless, true--"I do precisely what I think just and
right."
Said a friend who knew him well, "There was more of the woman in his
nature than in that of any man I ever knew--more of woman's tenderness
toward children, and sympathy with them. Often has he been known, though
he never had a child of his own, to walk up and down by the hour with an
infant in his arms, because by so doing he relieved it from the cause of
its crying; more also of woman's patience and uncomplaining, unnoticing
submissiveness to trivial causes of irritation. There was in him a
womanly modesty and delicacy.... By no man was the homage due to woman,
the only true homage she can receive--faith in her--more devoutly
rendered.... This peculiar tenderness of nature entered largely, no
doubt, into the composition of that _manner_ of his, with which so many
have been struck, and which was of the highest available stamp as
regards both dignity and grace."
Much of what he was in character he owed to Rachel Jackson. He once said
to a prominent man, "My wife was a pious Christian woman. She gave me
the best advice, and I have not been unmindful of it. When the people,
in their sovereign pleasure, elected me President of the United States,
_she_ said to me, 'Don't let your popularity turn your mind away from
the duty you owe to God. Before him we are all alike sinners, and to him
we must all alike give account. All these things will pass away, and you
and I and all of us must stand before God.' I have never forgotten it,
and I never shall."
[Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER.]
DANIEL WEBSTER.
In the little town of Salisbury, New Hampshire, now called Franklin,
Daniel Webster was born, January 18, 1782, the ninth in a family of ten
children. Ebenezer, the father, descended from a sturdy Puritan
ancestry, had fought in the French and Indian Wars; a brave, hardy
pioneer. He had cleared the wilderness for his log house, married a wife
who bore him five children, after which she died, and then married a
second time, Abigail Eastman, a woman of vigorous understanding, yet
tender and self-sacrificing. Of the five children of the latter wife,
three daughters and two sons, Daniel was the fourth, a slight, delicate
child, whose frail body made him especially dear to the mother, who felt
that at any time he might be taken out of her arms forever.
"In this hut," said Webster, years later, speaking of his father and
mother, "they endured together all sorts of privations and hardships; my
mother was constantly visited by Indians, who had never gone to a white
man's house but to kill its inhabitants, while my father, perhaps, was
gone, as he frequently was, miles away, carrying on his back the corn
to be ground, which was to support his family."
The father was absent from home, also, on more important errands. When
the news of the battle of Bunker Hill thrilled the colonies, Captain
Webster, who had won his title in the earlier wars, raised a company,
and at once started for the scene of action. He fought at Bennington
under Stark, being the first to scale the Tory breastworks, at White
Plains, and was at West Point when Arnold attempted to surrender it to
the British. He stood guard before General Washington's headquarters,
the night of Arnold's treason. No wonder, when Washington looked upon
the robust form nearly six feet high, with black hair and eyes, and firm
decisive manner, he said, "Captain Webster, I believe I can trust
_you_."
And so thought the people of New Hampshire, for they made him a member
of both Houses of the State Legislature at various times, and a Judge of
the Court of Common Pleas in his own county.
The delicate boy Daniel was unable to work on the farm like his brother
Ezekiel, two years older, but found his pleasure and pastime in reading,
and in studying nature. The home, "Elms Farm," as it was called later,
from the elms about it, was in a valley at a bend of the Merrimac. From
here the boy gazed upon Mount Kearsarge, and Mount Washington, the king
of the White Mountain peaks, and if he did not dream of what the future
had in store for him, he grew broad in soul from such surroundings.
Great mountains, great reaches of sea or plain, usually bring great
thoughts and plans to those who view them with a loving heart.
Daniel had little opportunity for schooling in those early years. He
says, in his autobiography, "I do not remember when or by whom I was
taught to read, because I cannot, and never could, recollect a time when
I could not read the Bible. I suppose I was taught by my mother, or by
my elder sisters. My father seemed to have no higher object in the world
than to educate his children to the full extent of his very limited
ability. No means were within his reach, generally speaking, but the
small town-schools. These were kept by teachers, sufficiently
indifferent, in the several neighborhoods of the township, each a small
part of the year. To these I was sent with the other children.... In
these schools nothing was taught but reading and writing; and as to
these, the first I generally could perform better than the teacher, and
the last a good master could hardly instruct me in; writing was so
laborious, irksome, and repulsive an occupation to me always."
Much of the boy's time was spent in rambles along the Merrimac river,
formed by the Winnipiseogee and the Pemigewasset, "the beau ideal of a
mountain stream; cold, noisy, winding, and with banks of much
picturesque beauty." He loved to fish along the streams, having for
company an old British soldier and sailor, Robert Wise. "He was," says
Webster, "my Isaac Walton. He had a wife but no child. He loved me,
because I would read the newspapers to him, containing the accounts of
battles in the European wars. When I have read to him the details of the
victories of Howe and Jervis, etc., I remember he was excited almost to
convulsions, and would relieve his excitement by a gush of exulting
tears. He finally picked up a fatherless child, took him home, sent him
to school, and took care of him, only, as he said, that he might have
some one to read the newspaper to him. He could never read himself.
Alas, poor Robert! I have never so attained the narrative art as to hold
the attention of others as thou, with thy Yorkshire tongue, hast held
mine. Thou hast carried me many a mile on thy back, paddled me over and
over and up and down the stream, and given whole days in aid of my
boyish sports, and asked no meed but that, at night, I would sit down at
thy cottage door, and read to thee some passage of thy country's glory!"
Daniel heard of battles from another source beside Robert Wise. In the
long winter evenings, when the family were snow-bound, Captain Webster
would tell stories of the Revolutionary War, and the boy grew patriotic,
as he heard of the brave soldiers who died to bring freedom to unborn
generations. When he was eight years old, with all the money at his
command, twenty-five cents, he went into a little shop "and bought," as
he says, "a small cotton pocket-handkerchief, with the Constitution of
the United States printed on its two sides. From this I learned either
that there was a Constitution, or that there were thirteen States. I
remember to have read it, and have known more or less of it ever since."
Years afterward he said, "that there was not an article, a section, a
clause, a phrase, a word, a syllable, or even a comma, of that
Constitution, which he had not studied and pondered in every relation
and in every construction of which it was susceptible."
How important a part this twenty-five cent handkerchief played in the
lives of the two Webster boys! There is no soil so mellow as that of a
child's mind; it needs no enriching save love that warms it like
sunshine. What is planted there early, grows rank and tall, and mothers
do most of the planting.
The lad's reading in these boyish days was confined mostly to the
"Spectator," and Pope's "Essay on Man." The whole of the latter he
learned to repeat. "We had so few books," he says, "that to read them
once or twice was nothing. We thought they were all to be got by heart."
The yearly almanac was regarded as "an acquisition." Once when Ezekiel
and he had a dispute, after retiring, as to a couplet at the head of the
April page, Daniel got up, groped his way to the kitchen, lighted a
candle, looked at the quotation, found himself in the wrong, and went
back to bed. But he had inadvertently, at two o'clock at night in
midwinter, set the house on fire, which was saved by his father's
presence of mind. Daniel said, "They were in pursuit of light, but got
more than they wanted."
Exceedingly fond of poetry, at twelve he could repeat many of the hymns
of Dr. Watts. Later, he found delight in Don Quixote, of which he says,
"I began to read it, and it is literally true that I never closed my
eyes until I had finished it; nor did I lay it down, so great was the
power of that extraordinary book on my imagination." Later still,
Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible became his inspiration.
Years after, he used to say, "I have read through the entire Bible many
times. I now make it a practice to go through it once a year. It is the
book of all others for lawyers as well as for divines; and I pity the
man that cannot find in it a rich supply of thought, and of rules for
his conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death!"
Captain Webster had secretly nourished the thought that he should send
Daniel to college, but he was not a man to awaken false hopes, so he
made no mention of his thoughts. An incident related by Daniel shows his
father's heart in the matter. "Of a hot day in July, it must have been
in one of the last years of Washington's administration, I was making
hay with my father. About the middle of the forenoon, the Honorable
Abiel Foster, who lived in Canterbury, six miles off, called at the
house, and came into the field to see my father. He was a worthy man,
college-learned, and had been a minister, and was not a person of any
considerable natural power. He talked a while in the field and went on
his way. When he was gone, my father called me to him, and we sat down
beneath the elm, on a haycock. He said, 'My son, that is a worthy man;
he is a member of Congress; he goes to Philadelphia, and gets six
dollars a day, while I toil here. It is because he had an education,
which I never had. If I had had his early education, I should have been
in Philadelphia in his place. I came near it as it was. But I missed it,
and now I must work here.' 'My dear father,' said I, 'you shall not
work. Brother and I shall work for you, and will wear our hands out, and
you shall rest.' And I remember to have cried, and I cry now at the
recollection. 'My child,' said he, 'it is of no importance to me. I now
live but for my children. I could not give your elder brothers the
advantages of knowledge, but I can do something for you. Exert yourself,
improve your opportunities, learn, learn, and, when I am gone, you will
not need to go through the hardships which I have undergone, and which
have made me an old man before my time.'"
Daniel never forgot those precious words, "Improve your opportunities,
learn, learn." The next year, 1796, he went to Phillips Exeter Academy,
where he found ninety boys. He had come with his plain clothes from his
plain home, while many of the others had come from rich and aristocratic
families. Sometimes the boys ridiculed his country ways and country
dress. Little they knew of the future that was to give them some slight
renown simply because they happened to be in the same class with this
country lad! When will the world learn not to judge a person by his
clothes! When the first term at Exeter was near its close, the usher,
Nicholas Emery, afterward an eminent lawyer in Portland, Maine, said to
Webster, "You may stop a few minutes after school: I wish to speak to
you." He then told the lad that he was a better scholar than any in his
class, that he learned more readily and easily, and that if he returned
to school he should be put into a higher class, and not be hindered by
boys who cared more for play and dress than for solid improvement.
"These were the first truly encouraging words," said Mr. Webster, "that
I ever received with regard to my studies. I then resolved to return,
and pursue them with diligence and so much ability as I possessed."
Blessings on thee, Nicholas Emery! Strange that either from
indifference, or what we think the world will say, we forget to speak a
helpful or an encouraging word. True appreciation is not flattery.
Daniel was at this time extremely diffident--a manner that speaks well
for a boy or girl generally--and was helped out of it by a noble young
teacher, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, who died at twenty-eight. Mr.
Webster says, "I believe I made tolerable progress in most branches
which I attended to while in this school; but there was one thing I
could not do--I could not make a declamation. I could not speak before
the school. The kind and excellent Buckminster sought, especially, to
persuade me to perform the exercise of declamation like other boys, but
I could not do it. Many a piece did I commit to memory, and recite and
rehearse in my own room, over and over again, yet, when the day came,
when the school collected to hear declamations, when my name was called,
and I saw all eyes turned to my seat, I could not raise myself from it.
Sometimes the instructors frowned, sometimes they smiled. Mr.
Buckminster always pressed and entreated, most winningly, that I would
venture, but I could never command sufficient resolution. When the
occasion was over, I went home and wept bitter tears of mortification."
After nine months at Exeter, Daniel began to study with Rev. Samuel
Wood, a minister in the adjoining town of Boscawen, six miles from
Salisbury. As Captain Webster was driving over with his son, he
communicated to him his plan of sending him to college. "I remember,"
says Daniel Webster, "the very hill which we were ascending, through
deep snows, in a New England sleigh, when my father made known this
purpose to me. I could not speak. How could he, I thought, with so large
a family, and in such narrow circumstances, think of incurring so great
an expense for me? A warm glow ran all over me, and I laid my head on my
father's shoulder and wept."
All through life, Mr. Webster, greatest of American orators, was never
afraid nor ashamed to weep. Children are not, and the nearer we keep to
the naturalness of children, with reasonable self-control, the more
power we have over others, and the sweeter and purer grow our natures.
While Daniel was at Dr. Wood's, a characteristic incident occurred. He
says: "My father sent for me in haying time to help him, and put me into
a field to turn hay, and left me. It was pretty lonely there, and, after
working some time, I found it very dull; and as I knew my father was
gone away, I walked home, and asked my sister Sally if she did not want
to go and pick some whortle-berries. She said, yes. So I went and got
some horses, and put a side-saddle on one, and we set off. We did not
get home until it was pretty late, and I soon went to bed. When my
father came home he asked my mother where I was, and what I had been
about. She told him. The next morning, when I awoke, I saw all the
clothes I had brought from Dr. Wood's tied up in a small bundle again.
When I saw my father, he asked me how I liked haying. I told him I found
it 'pretty dull and lonesome yesterday.' 'Well,' said he, 'I believe you
may as well go back to Dr. Wood's.' So I took my bundle under my arm,
and on my way I met Thomas W. Thompson, a lawyer in Salisbury; he
laughed very heartily when he saw me. 'So,' said he, 'your farming is
over, is it?'"
In August, 1797, when Daniel was fifteen, he entered Dartmouth College;
there he proved a genial, affectionate friend, and a devoted student.
But for this natural warmth of heart, he probably never would have been
an orator, for those only move others whose own hearts are moved. "He
had few intimates," says Henry Cabot Lodge, in his admirably written and
discriminating "Life of Webster," "but many friends. He was generally
liked as well as universally admired, was a leader in the college
societies, active and successful in sports, simple, hearty, unaffected,
without a touch of priggishness, and with a wealth of wholesome animal
spirits."