270 ANDREW JACKSON 



nation, unless it may have been Holland, had so many 

 on the ocean. This fact kept foreign politics in the 

 foreground until the culmination of the long quarrel 

 was reached in the War of 1812-1815. That war has 

 been called, with much propriety, our second war of 

 independence. It taught other nations that we were 

 not to be insulted with impunity, and it set our politics 

 free from European complications. The year 1815 

 marks an epoch on both sides of the Atlantic. It was 

 the beginning of thirty years of peace, during which, 

 in America as in England, attention could be devoted 

 to political and social reforms. Great and exciting 

 questions of domestic politics soon came up to occupy 

 the attention of Americans, and their thoughts were 

 much less intimately concerned with what people were 

 saying and doing on the other side of the ocean. We 

 also paid less attention to European manners and 

 fashions. Our statesmen of the Revolutionary period 

 dressed very much like Englishmen, and since the 

 Civil War it is so again. But in the intermediate 

 period, between 1815 and 1860, we had the bright blue 

 coat with brass buttons and the buff waistcoat, such as 

 Daniel Webster used to wear when he made those im- 

 mortal speeches that did so much to enkindle a pas- 

 sionate love for the Union and make it strong enough 

 to endure the shock of war. That blue dress-coat with 

 brass buttons was the visible symbol of the period of 

 narrow, boastful, provincial, but wholesome and much- 

 needed, Americanism. 



Now, this feeling of Americanism grew up more 

 rapidly and acquired greater intensity in the new 

 states west of the mountains than in the old states 

 on the seaboard. Observe the surprising rapidity 



