victory by trampling upon the prostrate bodies of his foes. Clay felt the humiliation so keenly that he wrote to one of his friends: “I shall hail with the greatest pleasure the occurrence of circumstances which will admit of my resignation without dishonor to myself. The Senate is no longer a place for a decent man. Yesterday Benton's expunging resolution passed, 24 to 19.” And to another: “I shall escape from it [the Senate] as soon as I decently can, with the same pleasure that one would fly from a charnel-house.”
On March 4, 1837, the “reign of Andrew Jackson,” as Von Holst has very appropriately called it, came to an end. There had never been before, and fortunately there has never been since, so powerful and autocratic a will at the head of the government, and so phenomenal a popularity to support it. The passions excited by the vociferous contests of those days were so fierce and enduring that in Jackson's own time, and through a decade or two following, a large majority of American citizens might have been divided into two classes, — those who sincerely and inflexibly believed that Jackson was one of the greatest statesmen of all centuries, and certainly the greatest benefactor of the American people; and those who believed with equally inflexible sincerity that he was little better than a fiend in human shape. It required a new generation to do justice to him as well as to his opponents.
It is generally conceded now that he was a man
