for the better. A change, therefore, was wanted. General Harrison represented that change, and the future would take care of itself.
There has probably never been a presidential campaign of more enthusiasm and less thought than the Whig campaign of 1840. As soon as it was fairly started, it resolved itself into a popular frolic. There was no end of monster mass meetings, with log cabins, raccoons, and hard cider. One half of the American people seemed to have stopped work to march in processions behind brass bands or drum and fife, to attend huge picnics, and to sing campaign doggerel about “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” The array of speakers on the Whig side was most imposing: Clay, Webster, Corwin, Ewing, Clayton, Preston, Choate, Wise, Reverdy Johnson, Everett, Prentiss, Thompson of Indiana, and a host of lesser lights. But the immense multitudes gathered at the meetings came to be amused, not to be instructed. They met, not to think and deliberate, but to laugh and shout and sing.
Clay, faithful to his promise, supported the Whig candidates with much energy, speaking at many places. In one of his addresses — a speech delivered at Taylorsville in Virginia — he undertook to “sound the key-note of the campaign” by laying down an elaborate and carefully prepared programme for future action in case of a Whig victory. At the start, however, he declared that he “did not pretend to announce the purposes of
