A little later a change in the method of nominating the President from a congressional caucus to a national convention still further developed the power of patronage as a party resource, and in the session of 1825-26, when John Quincy Adams was President, Mr. Benton introduced his report upon Mr. Macon’s resolution declaring the necessity of reducing and regulating executive patronage; although Mr. Adams, the last of the Revolutionary line of Presidents, so scorned to misuse patronage that he leaned backward in standing erect.  The pressure for the overthrow of the constitutional system had grown steadily more angry and peremptory with the progress of the country, the development of party spirit, the increase of patronage, the unanticipated consequences of the sole executive power of removal, and the immense opportunity offered by the four-years’ law.  It was a pressure against which Jefferson held the gates by main force, which was relaxed by the war under Madison and the fusion of parties under Monroe, but which swelled again into a furious torrent as the later parties took form.  John Quincy Adams adhered, with the tough tenacity of his father’s son, to the best principles of all his predecessors.  He followed Washington, and observed the spirit of the Constitution in refusing to remove for any reason but official misconduct or incapacity.  But he knew well what was coming, and with characteristically stinging sarcasm he called General Jackson’s inaugural address “a threat of re-form.”  With Jackson’s administration in 1830 the deluge of the spoils system burst over our national politics.  Sixteen years later, Mr. Buchanan said in a public speech that General Taylor would be faithless to the Whig party if he did not proscribe Democrats.  So high the deluge had risen which has ravaged and wasted our politics ever since, and the danger will be stayed only when every President, leaning upon the law, shall stand fast where John Quincy Adams stood.

But the debate continued during the whole Jackson administration.  In the Senate and on the stump, in elaborate reports and popular speeches, Webster, Calhoun, and Clay, the great political chiefs of their time, sought to alarm the country with the dangers of patronage.  Sargent S. Prentiss, in the House of Representatives, caught up and echoed the cry under the administration of Van Buren.  But the country refused to be alarmed.  As the Yankee said of the Americans at the battle of White Plains, where they were beaten, “The fact is, as far as I can understand, our folks did n’t seem to take no sort of interest in that battle.”  The reason that the country took no sort of interest in the discussion of the evils of patronage was evident.  It believed the denunciation to be a mere party cry, a scream of disappointment and impotence from those who held no places and controlled no patronage.  It heard the leaders of the opposition fiercely arraigning the administration for proscription and universal wrong-doing,