“Oh, hang General Jackson,” exclaimed Fanny Kemble one day, after dinner, in the cabin of the ship that brought her, in the summer of 1832, to the United States.  Even before she set foot on our shores, the brilliant English actress was tired of the din of politics and bored by the incessant repetition of the President’s name.  Subsequently she was presented at the White House and had an opportunity to form her own opinion of the “monarch” whose name and deeds were on everybody’s lips; and the impression was by no means unfavorable.  “Very tall and thin he was,” says her journal, “but erect and dignified; a good specimen of a fine old, well-battered soldier; his manners perfectly simple and quiet, and, therefore, very good.”

Small wonder that the name of Jackson was heard wherever men and women congregated in 1832!  Something more than half of the people of the country were at the moment trying to elect the General to a second term as President, and something less than half were putting forth their best efforts to prevent such a “calamity.”  Three years of Jacksonian rule had seen the civil service revolutionized, the Cabinet banished from its traditional place in the governmental system, and the conduct of the executive branch given a wholly new character and bent.  Internal improvements had been checked by the Maysville Road veto.  The United States Bank had been given a blow, through another veto, which sent it staggering.  Political fortunes had been made and unmade by a wave of the President’s hand.  The first attempt of a State to put the stability of the Union to the test had brought the Chief Executive dramatically into the role of defender of the nation’s dignity and perpetuity.  No previous President had so frequently challenged the attention of the public; none had kept himself more continuously in the forefront of political controversy.

Frail health and close application to official duties prevented Jackson from traveling extensively during his eight years in the White House.  He saw the Hermitage but once in this time, and on but one occasion did he venture far from the capital.  This was in the summer of 1833, when he toured the Middle States and New England northward as far as Concord, New Hampshire.  Accompanied by Van Buren, Lewis Cass, Levi Woodbury, and other men of prominence, the President set off from Washington in early June.  At Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and intervening cities the party was received with all possible demonstrations of regard.  Processions moved through crowded streets; artillery thundered salutes; banquet followed banquet; the enthusiasm of the masses was unrestrained.  At New York the furnishings of the hotel suite occupied by the President were eventually auctioned off as mementoes of the occasion.