Never before had the city of Washington seen such an inauguration as took place on the fourth of March following.  It seemed as though the whole population of the country had assembled there to see the old fighter take the oath of office.  Daniel Webster wrote of it, “I never saw such a crowd here before.  Persons came five hundred miles to see General Jackson and really seem to think that our country is rescued from some dreadful danger.”  As, perhaps, it was.

Jackson began his administration with characteristic vigor.  It was he who first put into practice the principle, “To the victors belong the spoils.”  There was about him no academic courtesy, and he proceeded at once to displace many Federal officeholders and to replace them with his own adherents.  The Senate tried for a time to stem the tide, but was forced to give it up.  There was no withstanding that fierce and dominant personality.  Jackson was more nearly a dictator than any President had ever been before him, or than any will ever be again.  His great popularity seemed rather to increase than to diminish, and in 1832, he received no less than 219 electoral votes.

[Illustration:  Jackson]

Let us do him justice.  Prejudiced and ignorant and wrong-headed as he was, he was a pure patriot, laboring for his country’s good.  Nothing proves this more strongly than his attitude on the nullification question, in other words, the right of a state to refuse to obey a law of the United States, and to withdraw from the Union, should it so desire.  This is not the place to go into the constitutional argument on this question.  It is, of course, all but certain that the original thirteen states had no idea, when they ratified the Constitution, that they were entering an alliance from which they would forever be powerless to withdraw; and the right of withdrawal had been asserted in New England more than once.  South Carolina was the hot-bed of nullification sentiment, arising partly from the growing anti-slavery feeling at the North, and partly because of the enactment of a tariff law which was felt to be unjust, and on October 25, 1832, the South Carolina legislature passed an ordinance asserting that, since the state had entered the Union of its free will, it could withdraw from it at any time and resume the sovereign and independent position which it had held at the close of the Revolution, and that it would do so should there be any attempt to enforce the tariff laws within the state.

Jackson’s attitude on this question was already well known.  At a banquet celebrating Jefferson’s birthday, two years before, at which Calhoun and others had given toasts and made addresses in favor of nullification, Jackson had startled his audience by rising, glass in hand, and giving the toast, “Our Federal Union—­it must be preserved!” That toast had fallen like a bombshell among the ranks of the nullifiers, and had electrified the whole Nation.  Since then, he had become a stronger nationalist than