CONTENTS.
PAGE
[CHAPTER I.]
The Young West1
[CHAPTER II.]
Benton's Early Life and Entry into the Senate23
[CHAPTER III.]
Early Years in the Senate47
[CHAPTER IV.]
The Election of Jackson, and the Spoils System69
[CHAPTER V.]
The Struggle with the Nullifiers88
[CHAPTER VI.]
Jackson and Benton make War on the Bank114
[CHAPTER VII.]
The Distribution of the Surplus143
[CHAPTER VIII.]
The Slave Question appears in Politics157
[CHAPTER IX.]
The Children's Teeth are set on Edge184
[CHAPTER X.]
Last Days of the Jacksonian Democracy209
[CHAPTER XI.]
The President without a Party237
[CHAPTER XII.]
Boundary Troubles with England260
[CHAPTER XIII.]
The Abolitionists Dance to the Slave Barons' Piping290
[CHAPTER XIV.]
Slavery in the New Territories317
[CHAPTER XV.]
The Losing Fight341
THOMAS HART BENTON.
CHAPTER I.
THE YOUNG WEST.
Even before the end of the Revolutionary War the movement had begun which was to change in form a straggling chain of sea-board republics into a mighty continental nation, the great bulk of whose people would live to the westward of the Appalachian Mountains. The hardy and restless backwoodsmen, dwelling along the eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, were already crossing the mountain-crests and hewing their way into the vast, sombre forests of the Mississippi basin; and for the first time English-speaking communities were growing up along waters whose outlet was into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Atlantic Ocean. Among these communities Kentucky and Tennessee were the earliest to form themselves into states; and around them, as a nucleus, other states of the woodland and the prairie were rapidly developed, until, by the close of the second decade in the present century, the region between the Great Lakes and the Gulf was almost solidly filled in, and finally, in 1820, by the admission of Missouri, the Union held within its borders a political body whose whole territory lay to the west of the Mississippi.