Four years passed.  In December, 1823, General Jackson reappeared in Washington to take his seat in the Senate, to which he had been elected by his wire-pullers for the purpose of promoting his interests as a candidate for the Presidency.  Before he left home two or three of his friends had besought him to assume a mild and conciliatory demeanor at the capitol.  It would never do, they told him, for a candidate for the Presidency to threaten to cut off the ears of gentlemen who disapproved his public conduct; he must restrain himself and make friends.  This advice he followed.  He was reconciled with General Winfield Scott, whom, in 1817, he had styled an “assassin,” a “hectoring bully,” and an “intermeddling pimp and spy of the War Office.”  He made friends with Colonel Thomas H. Benton, with whom he had fought in the streets of Nashville, while he still carried in his body a bullet received in that bloody affray.  With Henry Clay, too, he resumed friendly intercourse, met him twice at dinner-parties, rode and exchanged visits with him, and attended one of the Speaker’s Congressional dinners.

When next these party chieftains met, in the spring of 1825, it was about to devolve upon the House of Representatives to decide which of three men should be the next President,—­Jackson, Adams, or Crawford.  They exchanged visits as before; Mr. Clay being desirous, as he said, to show General Jackson that, in the vote which he had determined to give, he was influenced only by public considerations.  No reader needs to be informed that Mr. Clay and his friends were able to decide the election, and that they decided it in favor of Mr. Adams.  We believe that Mr. Clay was wrong in so doing.  As a Democrat he ought, we think, to have been willing to gratify the plurality of his fellow-citizens, who had voted for General Jackson.  His motives we fully believe to have been disinterested.  Indeed, it was plainly intimated to him that, if he gave the Presidency to General Jackson, General Jackson would make him his heir apparent, or, in other words, his Secretary of State.

The anger of General Jackson at his disappointment was not the blind and wild fury of his earlier days; it was a deeper, a deadlier wrath, which he governed and concealed in order to wreak a feller vengeance.  On the evening of the day on which the election in the House occurred there was a levee at the Presidential mansion, which General Jackson attended.  Who, that saw him dart forward and grasp Mr. Adams cordially by the hand, could have supposed that he then entirely believed that Mr. Adams had stolen the Presidency from him by a corrupt bargain with Mr. Clay?  Who could have supposed that he and his friends had been, for fourteen days, hatching a plot to blast the good name of Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay, by spreading abroad the base insinuation that Clay had been bought over to the support of Adams by the promise of the first place in the Cabinet?  Who could have supposed that, on his way home to Tennessee, while the newspapers were paragraphing his magnanimity in defeat, as shown by his behavior at the levee, he would denounce Adams and Clay, in bar-rooms and public places, as guilty of a foul compact to frustrate the wishes of the people?