LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME XII

Sherman’s March to the Sea
After the painting by F.O.C.  Darley.

James Monroe
After the painting by Gilbert Stuart, City Hall, New York.

Andrew Jackson
After a photograph from life.

Henry Clay
From a daguerreotype.

Martin Van Buren
From a daguerreotype.

Daniel Webster
After a drawing from a daguerreotype.

John C. Calhoun
From a daguerreotype.

James K. Polk
From a daguerreotype.

Abraham Lincoln
After an unretouched negative from life, found in 1870.

General George B. McClellan
After a photograph from life in the possession of the War Department,
Washington, D.C.

Ulysses S. Grant
After the painting by Chappel.

Assassination of President Lincoln
After the drawing by Fr. Roeber.

Robert E. Lee
From a photograph.

BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY.

ANDREW JACKSON.

1767-1845.

PERSONAL POLITICS.

It is very seldom that a man arises from an obscure and humble position to an exalted pre-eminence, without peculiar fitness for the work on which his fame rests, and which probably no one else could have done so well.  He may not be learned, or cultured; he may be even unlettered and rough; he may be stained by vulgar defects and vices which are fatal to all dignity of character; but there must be something about him which calls out the respect and admiration of those with whom he is surrounded, so as to give him a start, and open a way for success in the business or enterprise where his genius lies.

Such a man was Andrew Jackson.  Whether as a youth, or as a man pursuing his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier settlement, he was about the last person of whom one would predict that he should arise to a great position and unbounded national popularity.  His birth was plebeian and obscure.  His father, of Scotch-Irish descent, lived in a miserable hamlet in North Carolina, near the South Carolina line, without owning a single acre of land,—­one of the poorest of the poor whites.  The boy Andrew, born shortly after his father’s death in 1767, was reared in poverty and almost without education, learning at school only to “read, write, and cipher;” nor did he have any marked desire for knowledge, and never could spell correctly.  At the age of thirteen he was driven from his native village by its devastation at the hands of the English soldiers, during the Revolutionary War.  His mother, a worthy and most self-reliant woman, was an ardent patriot, and all her boys—­Hugh, Robert, and Andrew—­enlisted in the local home-guard.  The elder two died, Hugh of exposure