Soon after he took his seat in Congress, the movement against slavery was begun, and one fruit of it was the appearance of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the House of Representatives.  A few were presented by Mr. Adams, and then more and more, as they were sent in to him, and finally the southern representatives became so aroused, that they succeeded in passing what was known as the “gag rule,” which prevented the reception of these petitions by the House.  Adams protested against this rule as an invasion of his constitutional rights, and from that time forward, amid the bitterest opposition, addressed his whole force toward the vindication of the right of petition.  On every petition day, he would offer, in constantly increasing numbers, petitions which came to him from all parts of the country for the abolition of slavery.  The southern representatives were driven almost to madness, but Adams kept doggedly on his way, and every year renewed his motion to strike out the gag rule.  As constant dripping will wear away a stone, so his persistence wore away opposition, or, rather, the sentiment of the country was gradually changing, and at last, on December 3, 1844, his motion prevailed, and the great battle which he had fought practically alone was won.  Four years later he fell, stricken with paralysis, at his place in the House.

It is worth pausing to remark that, of the six men who, up to this time, had held the presidency, four were from Virginia and two from Massachusetts; that, in every instance, the Virginians had been re-elected and had administered the affairs of the country to the satisfaction of the people, while both the Massachusetts men had been retired from office at the end of a single term, and after turbulent and violent administrations.  All of them were what may fairly be called patricians, men of birth and breeding; they were the possessors of a certain culture and refinement, were descended from well-known families, and there seemed every reason to believe that the administration of the country would be continued in the hands of such men.  For what other class of men was fitted to direct it?  Then, suddenly, the people spoke, and selected for their ruler a man from among themselves, a man whose college was the backwoods, whose opinions were prejudices rather than convictions, and yet who was, withal, perhaps the greatest popular idol this country will ever see; whose very blunders endeared him to the people, because they knew his heart was right.

* * * * *

On the fifteenth day of March, 1767, in a little log cabin on the upper Catawba river, almost on the border-line between North and South Carolina—­so near it, in fact, that no one knows certainly in which state it stood—­a boy was born and christened Andrew Jackson.  His father had died a few days before—­one of those sturdy Scotch-Irish whom we have seen emigrating to America in such numbers in search of a land of freedom.  The boy grew up in the rude backwoods settlement, rough, boisterous, unlettered; at the age of fourteen, riding with Sumter in the guerrilla warfare waged throughout the state against the British, and then, captured and wounded on head and hand by a sabre-stroke whose mark he bore till his dying day, a prisoner in the filthy Camden prison-pen, sick of the small-pox, and coming out of it, at last, more dead than alive.