294 ANDREW JACKSON 



Me Lane, Treasury ; Lewis Cass, War ; Levi Woodbury, 

 Navy ; R. B. Taney, Attorney-general ; in post-office, 



older. I suppose she may need money, or craves notoriety which it may 

 bring her. . . . 



" When my Parents bought their home opposite the War Department it 

 needed extensive repairs, and we went to live there before it was free from 

 the smell of paint. The President when he called insisted that I stay at 

 the White House (as the paint made me ill) until the odour was gone. I 

 went, and it was quite six weeks before he and I thought it safe for me to 

 return home. I never had a happier visit. He did smoke his pipe after 

 dinner, and I have filled his fresh, clean clay pipes, with long cane stems, 

 many times for him ; but he rarely used a pipe more than one day, and 

 there was a bundle of canes brought along with the new pipes. ... I 

 thus became informed about some very important matters. The removal 

 of the Government funds from the Bank of the United States which was 

 then in progress was one of them. The President sent several friends to 

 New York to obtain reliable information from commercial monied men 

 about banks or institutions to which it might be safe to transfer the 

 Government Deposits. Mr. Kendall, from his letter, must have been one 

 of them, and wrote in the most discouraging tone, to which the President 

 replied ; and I either copied his letter or he dictated it, for I remember dis- 

 tinctly that he warned Mr. Kendall not to be misled by the emissaries of 

 Nicholas Biddle ('who is now a desperate man') and "who is nagging the 

 footsteps of every prominent official, 1 because nothing but the Public 

 Deposit concealed the fact that Biddle's Bank was at that moment ' bank- 

 rupt. 1 That was the year your class graduated at West Point. . . . 



" Blair mentioned to me that Mr. Fiske does not believe that General 

 Jackson threatened to hang Mr. Calhoun. I think he is mistaken. . . . 

 I am certain that the main import of the story was (as I heard it) true, 

 which was, upon the first ' overt act ' at Charleston, he would have Mr. 

 Calhoun and the other leading Conspirators arrested and tried for treason, 

 of which they would undoubtedly be found guilty, when he would hang 

 every one of them. I heard Mr. Crittenden and Father talk about this 

 matter; both laughed very heartily at the way in which Governor Letcher 

 described the effect on Mr. Calhoun of this threat, when Governor Letcher 

 reported to him the conversation with General Jackson in which the threat 

 was made, Governor Letcher saying to Mr. Calhoun that he came directly 

 from the White House to inform him of his peril. In 1842, when at the 

 Hermitage, General Jackson expressed his opinion to me very freely of Mr. 

 Calhoun, whose intellect he said was of the highest order, but he knew him 

 to be heartless, selfish, and a physical coward. Mr. Clay was his personal 

 enemy and had done him wrongs Mr. Calhoun dared not do, but Mr. Clay 

 was a brave man, and a patriot, who loved, and would have gladly given 

 his life to serve his country. 11 



