term and avowed all their negative principles in a candid platform. The Whigs, now at last welded into something like a united and aggressive party, nominated General Harrison, for whom most of them had voted four years before, for President, and for Vice President Mr. John Tyler, of Virginia. They made no declaration of

principles whatever, but proposed only to oust the Democrats. The country was willing. General Harrison was the hero of a well remembered battle in which that redoubtable chief called the "Prophet" of the Indians who hung upon the northwestern frontiers, had been routed, in 1811, and the western country quieted and made safe. He had himself been

WH Hanison dubbed "Tippecanoe,"

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

and men everywhere were ready to shout

very lustily for "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." The Democrats had no enthusiasm with which to match this for the old soldier and honorable gentleman of the elder type whom their opponents had chosen as their candidate; had only their dimmed record to speak of; and lost overwhelmingly. General Harrison, it is true, got but forty-six thousand votes more than Mr. Van Buren

received out of a total of nearly two and a half millions; but, though his margins were slender, counting by voters, he won in the electoral college by a majority of one hundred and seventy-four out of a total of two hundred and ninety-four (234-60). The Whigs saw their day dawn at last, and the Jacksonian régime

was over.

The authorities and sources for the events of this chapter are the same as those named under Chapter II. The following special authorities should, however, be added: the second volume of Albert S. Bolles's Financial History of the United States; Richard Hildreth's Banks, Banking, and Paper Currency; William G. Sumner's History of American Currency; Edward G. Bourne's Surplus Revenue of 1837; Goddard's Bank of the United States; C. F. Dunbar's Laws Relating to Finance; Shosuke Sato's Land Question in the fourth volume of the Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science; and Samuel Tyler's Life of Roger B. Taney.

VOL. VII.-8

III

THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY

IT remained to be seen whether the forces bred in the Jacksonian time were also spent and gone, with the passing from office of the men who had personified them. It was difficult to reason upon cause and effect amidst such scenes of change. Unquestionably a veritable revolution had been wrought in American politics and social action while Jackson and his partisans ruled in affairs; but who could say whether these men had been products or causes of that revolution? No doubt there had been an air of lawlessness in the headstrong action of the uncompromising, frontier soldier who had been President. The fruit of his rough handling had shown itself obviously enough during the mild reign of his lieutenant and successor. And the country had seemed to take its cue from General Jackson. Riot and brawling disorder had everywhere been thrust into affairs with unexampled boldness, success, immunity from punishment. Headstrong men sought everywhere to take the law into their own hands and do what seemed best in their own eyes,-used force to win strikes against their employers, to carry elections, to silence abolitionist agitators and drive free negroes out of the cities, to destroy the power of the Roman Catholics coming in at the ports, to punish offences

which the courts too slowly dealt with or let go by, to get food when prices rose too high. Men fought in armed bands in city streets because they were of opposite

religious creeds or rival political factions or antagonistic races, the native against the immigrant, the Protestant against the Roman Catholic. On a memorable night in August 1834, an Ursuline convent in Charlestown,

within sight of the rising shaft on Bunker Hill which was to mark the dawn of liberty in America, had been sacked and put to the torch, because of the rage of a Protestant mob against the growing power of the Romish church, coming in with the Irish immigrants; and the officers of the town had stood inactive by.

No man could justly say that General Jackson stood for such things. He kept the law, as he understood it, very punctiliously and with a fine sense of honor, and made others keep it also. His challenge was only to those who opposed him in matters of policy or in the application of law, or sought to put upon him the too formal restraints of judicial decision. Those who judged calmly of affairs saw alike in him and in the uneasy disorders of the time only signs of one and the same thing. In the new democracy which Jackson represented the mass of common men took leave to assert themselves in all things, and use their own standards of right; brushed law aside upon occasion to get at their object; sought to rectify abuses by direct blows of force,the force of voting numbers or the force of arms. No doubt riots grew more common in Jackson's second term than they had been in his first, and seemed to keep pace with his fight against the Bank, his arbitrary use of authority in reaching his ends concerning it, his ruthless dealings with the credit of the country. No doubt, too, his friends and partisans spoke too foolishly and too much like demagogues of "the natural hatred of the poor to the rich." But great economic forces moved also with equal pace towards change and disturbance. The relations of capital and labor were altered, whether General Jackson acted or not; prices rose and wages shifted by laws he did not understand.