put into requisition to sustain the Administration and its policy, but all were unavailing—­General Jackson was elected by an overwhelming majority.  Mr. Clay was immediately returned by Kentucky to the Senate, and organized an opposition upon the policy of the late Administration, led on by himself and Webster.  The memory of those days, and the men who made them memorable, flits vividly before me; but I am not writing a history, and can attempt no order, but shall write on as these memories of men and events shall seem to me most interesting in their character to the general reader.

General Jackson was one of those rare creations of nature which appear at long intervals, to astonish and delight mankind.  It seems to be settled in the public mind that he was born in South Carolina; but there is no certainty of the fact.  His early life was very obscure, and he himself was uncertain of his birth-place, though he believed it was South Carolina.  He remembered the removal of his family from South Carolina, and many of the incidents of the war of the Revolution transpiring there; but more especially those occurring in North Carolina, to which the family removed.  Judge Alexander Porter, of Louisiana, was an Irishman, and from the neighborhood where were born and reared the parents of Jackson.  His own father was brutally executed at Vinegar Hill, by sentence of a drum-head court martial, in 1798, and his family proscribed by the British Government.  With his uncle, the Rowans, the Jacksons, and some others, he emigrated to America, and settled at Nashville, Tennessee.  The Jacksons were of the same family, and distantly connected with General Jackson.  Great intimacy existed between this family and General Jackson for many years.

Judge Porter, of whom I shall hereafter have something to say, visited Europe a short time before his death, and made diligent search into the history of the Jackson family, without ascertaining anything positively:  he learned enough to satisfy his own mind that Andrew Jackson was born in Ireland, and brought to the United States by his parents when only two years old.  This was also the opinion of Thomas Crutcher, who came with General Jackson to Nashville, and it was also the opinion of Dr. Boyd McNary and his elder brother, Judge McNary, who believed he was four years older than he supposed himself to be.

The McNarys came with him from North Carolina.  On the trip a difficulty occurred between Boyd McNary and Jackson, which never was reconciled—­both dying in extreme old age.  Boyd McNary stopped at Lexington and read medicine, forming there the acquaintance of Mr. Clay and Felix Grundy.  The intimacy which sprang up between Clay and McNary was as ardent and imperishable as the hatred between himself and Jackson, enduring until death.  Jackson was enterprising and eminently self-reliant; in all matters pertaining to himself, he was his own counsellor; he advised with no man; cool and quick in thought, he seemed to leap to conclusions, and never went back from them.  An anecdote relative to his parting from his mother in his outset in life, illustrates this as prominent in the attributes of his nature at that time.  The writer heard him narrate this after his return from Washington, when his last term in the Presidential office had expired.