258 ANDREW JACKSON 



the United States, it might have been otherwise. As 

 soon as the administration had adopted Jackson's 

 measures, they were for that reason attacked in Con- 

 gress by Clay, whose opposition was at this time 

 factious, and this was the beginning of the bitter and 

 lifelong feud between Jackson and Clay. In 1819 the 

 purchase of Florida from Spain was effected, and in 

 1821 Jackson was appointed governor of that territory. 

 The victorious general was now in his fifty-fifth 

 year. Until the age of forty-five he had been little 

 known outside of Tennessee. It was then that the 

 Creek War gave him his opportunity, and revealed 

 the fact that there was a great general among us. 

 Since the battle of New Orleans he had come to be 

 as much a hero in America as Wellington in Eng- 

 land. The Iron Duke was never once defeated in 

 battle, but if he had ever come to blows with Old 

 Hickory, I do not feel absolutely sure that the record 

 might not have been broken. Jackson's boldness and 

 tenacity were combined with a fertility in resources 

 that made him, like Boots in the fairy tales, every- 

 where invincible. Alike in war and in politics we 

 already begin to see him always carrying the day. 

 One can see that the election of such a man to the 

 presidency would be likely to mark an era in Ameri- 

 can history. One sees in Jackson a representative 

 man. His virtues and his faults were largely those of 

 the frontier society that in those days lived west of the 

 Alleghanies. His election to the presidency was the 

 first great political triumph of that Western country 

 which Gouverneur Morris wished to see always kept 

 in leading-strings. The significance of this triumph I 

 shall try to point out in my next paper. 



