Before Adams had been in the White House six months the country was divided substantially into Jackson men and anti-Jackson or administration men.  The elements from which Jackson drew support were many and discordant.  The backbone of his strength was the self-assertive, ambitious western Democracy, which recognized in him its truest and most eminent representative.  The alliance with the Calhoun forces was kept up, although it was already jeopardized by the feeling of the South Carolinian’s friends that they, and not Jackson’s friends, should lead in the coming campaign.  After a good deal of hesitation the supporters of Crawford came over also.  Van Buren coquetted with the Adams forces for a year, and the old-line Republicans, strong in the Jeffersonian faith, brought themselves to the support of the Tenneseean with difficulty; but eventually both northern and southern wings of the Crawford contingent alined themselves against the Administration.  The decision of Van Buren brought into the Jackson ranks a past master in party management, “the cleverest politician in a State in which the sort of politics that is concerned with the securing of elections rather than fighting for principles had grown into a science and an art.”  By 1826 the Jackson forces were welded into a substantial party, although for a long time their principles involved little more than hostility to Adams and enthusiasm for Jackson, and they bore no other designation than Jackson men.

The elements that were left to support the Administration were the followers of Adams and Clay.  These eventually drew together under the name of National Republicans.  Their strength, however, was limited, for Adams could make no appeal to the masses, even in New England; while Clay, by contributing to Jackson’s defeat, had forfeited much of the popularity that would otherwise have been his.

If the story of Adams’s Administration could be told in detail, it would be one long record of rancorous warfare between the President and the Jacksonian opposition in Congress.  Adams, on the one hand, held inflexibly to his course, advocating policies and recommending measures which he knew had not the remotest chance of adoption; and, on the other hand, the opposition—­which in the last two years of the Administration controlled the Senate as well as the House of Representatives—­balked at no act that would humiliate the President and make capital for its western idol.  At the outset the Jacksonians tried to hold up the confirmation of Clay.  It fell furiously, and quite without discrimination, upon the President’s great scheme of national improvements, professing to see in it evidence of an insatiable desire for “concentration.”  In the discussion of a proposed amendment to the Constitution providing for direct election of the President by the people it was constantly assumed and frequently stated that Adams had no moral right to the position which he occupied.  The President’s decision