to send delegates to the Panama Congress of 1826 raised a storm of acrimonious debate and brought the Administration’s enemies into closer unison.  To cap the climax, Adams was solemnly charged with abuse of the federal patronage, and in the Senate six bills for the remedy of the President’s pernicious practices were brought in by Benton in a single batch!  Adams was able and honest, but he got no credit from his opponents for these qualities.  He, in turn, displayed little magnanimity; and in refusing to shape his policies and methods to meet the conditions under which he had to work, he fell short of the highest statesmanship.

As election year approached, it became clear that the people would at last have an opportunity to make a direct choice between Adams and Jackson.  Each candidate was formally nominated by sundry legislatures and other bodies; no one so much as suggested nomination by congressional caucus.  In the early months of 1828 the campaign rapidly rose to an extraordinary level of vigor and public interest.  Each party group became bitter and personal in its attacks upon the other; in our entire political history there have been not more than two or three campaigns so smirched with vituperation and abuse.  The Jackson papers and stump speakers laid great stress on Adams’s aristocratic temperament, denounced his policies as President, and exploited the “corrupt bargain” charge with all possible ingenuity.

On the other hand, the Adams-Clay forces dragged forth in long array Jackson’s quarrels, duels, and rough-and-tumble encounters to prove that he was not fit to be President; they distributed handbills decorated with coffins bearing the names of the candidate’s victims; they cited scores of actions, from the execution of mutinous militiamen in the Creek War to the quarrel with Callava, to show his arbitrary disposition; and they strove in a most malicious manner to undermine his popularity by breaking down his personal reputation, and even that of his wife and of his mother.  It has been said that “the reader of old newspaper files and pamphlet collections of the Adamsite persuasion, in the absence of other knowledge, would gather that Jackson was a usurper, an adulterer, a gambler, a cock-fighter, a brawler, a drunkard, and withal a murderer of the most cruel and blood-thirsty description.”  Issues—­tariff, internal improvements, foreign policy, slavery—­receded into the background; the campaign became for all practical purposes a personal contest between the Tennessee soldier and the two statesmen whom he accused of bargain and corruption.  “Hurrah for Jackson!” was the beginning and end of the creed of the masses bent on the Tenneseean’s election.