Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, was the heir apparent of the Virginia dynasty.  Formerly this would have meant a clear road to the White House.  Even now it was supposed to be a tremendous asset; and notwithstanding the Georgian’s personal unpopularity in most parts of the country, his advantages as the “regular candidate,” coupled with the long and careful campaign carried on in his behalf, were expected by many keen observers to pull him through.

A third candidate within the Cabinet circle was Calhoun, Secretary of War.  Like Crawford, he could expect to reach the presidency only by winning the support of one or more of the greater Northern States.  For a while he had hopes of Pennsylvania.  When it appeared that he had nothing to look for in this direction, he resigned himself to the conclusion that, since he was yet hardly forty years of age, his time had not yet come.

For the first time, the West now put forward candidates—­two of them, Clay and Jackson.  Clay was a Kentuckian, of Virginian birth and breeding, in whom were mingled the leading characteristics of both his native and his adopted section.  He was “impetuous, wilful, high-spirited, daring, jealous, but, withal, a lovable man.”  For a decade he had been the most conspicuous figure in the national House of Representatives.  He had raised the speakership to a high level of importance and through its power had fashioned a set of issues, reflective of western and middle-state ideas, upon which the politics of the country turned for more than a quarter of a century.  As befitted a “great conciliator,” he had admirers in every corner of the land.  Whether his strength could be sufficiently massed to yield electoral results remained to be discovered.

But what of Jackson?  If, as one writer has said, Clay was one of the favorites of the West, Jackson was the West itself.  “While Clay was able to voice, with statesmanlike ability, the demand for economic legislation to promote her interests, and while he exercised an extraordinary fascination by his personal magnetism and his eloquence, he never became the hero of the great masses of the West; he appealed rather to the more intelligent—­to the men of business and of property."[5] Jackson, however, was the very personification of the contentious, self-confident, nationalistic democracy of the interior.  He could make no claim to statesmanship.  He had held no important legislative or administrative position in his State, and his brief career in Congress was entirely without distinction.  He was a man of action, not a theorist, and his views on public questions were, even as late as 1820, not clear cut or widely known.  In a general way he represented the school of Randolph and Monroe, rather than that of Jefferson and Madison.  He was a moderate protectionist, because he believed that domestic manufactures would make the United States independent of European countries in time of war.  On the Bank and internal improvements his mind was not made up, although he was inclined to regard both as unconstitutional.