FROM JACKSON TO FILLMORE- 1832 -1851 51 



troops on muster days upon the watermelon patches of 

 Michigan, not only convulsed his audience, but were 

 echoed throughout the nation, Whigs and Democrats 

 laughing alike ; and when John Quincy Adams, in a speech 

 shortly afterward, referred to the man who brought on 

 this tempest of fun as &quot;the late General Crary,&quot; there 

 was a feeling that the adjective indicated a fact. It really 

 was so; Crary, although a man of merit, never returned 

 to Congress, but was thenceforth dropped from political 

 life. More than twenty years afterward, as I was passing 

 through Western Michigan, a friend pointed out to me 

 his tombstone, in a little village cemetery, with comments, 

 half comic, half pathetic; and I also recall a mournful 

 feeling when one day, in going over the roll of my stu 

 dents at the University of Michigan, I came upon one who 

 bore the baptismal name of Isaac Crary. Evidently, the 

 blighted young statesman had a daughter who, in all this 

 storm of ridicule and contempt, stood by him, loved him, 

 and proudly named her son after him. 



Another feature in the campaign also impressed me. 

 A blackguard orator, on the Whig side, one of those 

 whom great audiences applaud for the moment and ever 

 afterward despise, a man named Ogle, made a speech 

 which depicted the luxury prevailing at the White House, 

 and among other evidences of it, dwelt upon the &quot;gold 

 spoons&quot; used at the President s table, denouncing their 

 use with such unction that, for the time, unthinking peo 

 ple regarded Martin Van Buren as a sort of American 

 Vitellius. As a matter of fact, the scanty silver-gilt table 

 utensils at the White House have been shown, in these 

 latter days, in some very pleasing articles written by 

 General Harrison s grandson, after this grandson had 

 himself retired from the Presidency, to have been, for the 

 most part, bought long before; and by order of General 

 Washington. 



The only matter of political importance which, as a boy 

 eight years old, I seized upon, and which dwells in my 

 memory, was the creation of the &quot; Sub-Treasury. &quot; That 



