Mr. Calhoun, as a member of Mr. Monroe’s Cabinet, still played the part of a national man, and supported the measures of his party without exception.  Scarcely a trace of the sectional champion yet appears.  In 1819, he gave a written opinion favoring the cession of Texas in exchange for Florida; the motive of which was to avoid alarming the North by the prospective increase of Slave States.  In later years, Mr. Calhoun, of course, wished to deny this; and the written opinions of Mr. Monroe’s Cabinet on that question mysteriously disappeared from the archives of the State Department.  We have the positive testimony of Mr. John Quincy Adams, that Calhoun, in common with most Southern men of that day, approved the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and gave a written opinion that it was a constitutional measure.  That he was still an enthusiast for internal improvements, we have already mentioned.

The real difficulty of the War Department, however, as of the State Department, during the Monroe administration, was a certain Major-General Andrew Jackson, commanding the Military Department of the South.  The popularity of the man who had restored the nation’s self-love by ending a disastrous war with a dazzling and most unexpected victory, was something different from the respect which we all now feel for the generals distinguished in the late war.  The first honors of the late war are divided among four chieftains, each of whom contributed to the final success at least one victory that was essential to it.  But in 1815, among the military heroes of the war that had just closed General Jackson stood peerless and alone.  His success in defending the Southwest, ending in a blaze of glory below New Orleans, utterly eclipsed all the other achievements of the war, excepting alone the darling triumphs on the ocean and the lakes.  The deferential spirit of Mr. Monroe’s letters to the General, and the readiness of every one everywhere to comply with his wishes, show that his popularity, even then, constituted him a power in the Republic.  It was said in later times, that “General Jackson’s popularity could stand anything,” and in one sense this was true:  it could stand anything that General Jackson was likely to do.  Andrew Jackson could never have done a cowardly act, or betrayed a friend, or knowingly violated a trust, or broken his word, or forgotten a debt.  He was always so entirely certain that he, Andrew Jackson, was in the right, his conviction on this point was so free from the least quaver of doubt, that he could always convince other men that he was right, and carry the multitude with him.  His honesty, courage, and inflexible resolution, joined to his ignorance, narrowness, intensity, and liability to prejudice, rendered him at once the idol of his countrymen and the plague of all men with whom he had official connection.  Drop an Andrew Jackson from the clouds upon any spot of earth inhabited by men, and he will have half a dozen deadly feuds upon his hands in thirty days.