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 "the late General Crary," 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 "gold 

 spoons " 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 ' i Sub-Treasury. ' ' That 



