frantic efforts to shake hands with their hero-president they nearly crushed him to death.
President Jackson treated his political enemies as he did the Indians and the English. He turned thousands of men out of office and appointed his friends in their places. “To the victors belong the spoils,” he said, but most people to-day believe the warlike President had the wrong idea in treating public service as “spoils of war.” After serving his country as President, Andrew Jackson lived at the Hermitage, a beautiful mansion he had built near Nashville, Tennessee.
When the aged ex-President knew he was dying, he called his friends and slaves around his bed and told them he wanted them all to meet him in heaven. When the simple but grand old hero died, they found his dead wife’s miniature close to his heart where he had worn it for many years.
Then they remembered that, rough and violent as he often had been with men, he had never spoken a cross or cruel word to his wife or any of his own household.
“The bravest are the tenderest.”
WEBSTER, CLAY, CALHOUN, THREE GREAT CHAMPIONS IN CONGRESS
“THERE were giants in those days,” a hundred years ago in the United States of America; not giants in body, but in mind and heart. Besides the Presidents and the generals in the War of 1812 and the Indian wars, the greatest men in America were Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, who were in Congress together. Daniel Webster was the man of New England, Henry Clay of the west, and John C. Calhoun of the south.