228 ANDREW JACKSON 



yeomanry of New England and New York, and when 

 by and by the stress of civil war came, they were the 

 stout ligament that held the Union together. They 

 were, in a certain measure, set free from the excessive 

 attachment to a state government which was so liable 

 to mislead the dweller in the older communities. The 

 governments of the seaboard states were older than 

 the federal Union ; but the states west of the Alle- 

 ghanies were created by the federal Union, and their 

 people felt toward it a strong sense of allegiance. 

 It was sufficient in 1861 to keep Missouri and Ken- 

 tucky, with portions of Tennessee and Virginia, from 

 joining the Southern Confederacy, which was thus 

 seriously truncated and lamed at the very start. 



These considerations will help us to understand the 

 remarkable career of Andrew Jackson. His personal 

 characteristics were in large measure the characteristics 

 of the community in which he lived. There was the 

 intense Americanism, the contempt for things foreign, 

 the love for the Union, the iron tenacity of purpose, 

 the promptness in redressing his own grievances, the 

 earnest Puritan spirit. Some of these characteristics 

 in Jackson, as in his neighbours, came naturally by 

 inheritance. Of all the pugnacious and masterful, 

 single-minded, conscientious, and obstinate Puritans 

 that have ever lived in any country, the first place 

 must doubtless be assigned to those Scotchmen and 

 Yorkshiremen who went over to Ulster and settled 

 there in the reign of James I. Perhaps it was the 

 constant knocking against Irish Catholicism that 

 hammered them out so hard. A good many of them 

 came to America in the course of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, and among these was Andrew Jackson of Car- 



