ever; besides, he was always ready for a fight, and whenever he saw a head had the true Irishman’s impulse to hit it.  So he responded to the South Carolina nullification ordinance by sending two men-of-war to Charleston harbor and collecting a force of United States troops along the Carolina border.  “I consider the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union,” he wrote; and when a South Carolina congressman, about to go home, asked the President if he had any commands for his friends in that state, Jackson retorted: 

“Yes, I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on, engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”

Whether or not this message was delivered history does not say, but the whole Nation arose in wrath behind its President, state after state denounced nullification and disunion, and the South Carolina ordinance was finally repealed.  So the storm passed for the moment.  It left Jackson more of a popular hero than ever; it was as though he had won another battle of New Orleans.  One cannot but wonder what would have happened had he been acting as President, instead of Buchanan, in those trying years after 1856.

He retired from the presidency broken in health and fortune, for however well he took care of the interests of his friends, he was always careless about his own.  The last eight years of his life were spent at his Tennessee estate, The Hermitage.  The end came in 1845, but his name has remained as a kind of watchword among the common people—­a synonym for rugged honesty, and bluff sincerity.  His career is, all in all, by far the most remarkable of any man who ever held the high office of President—­with one possible exception, that of Abraham Lincoln.

* * * * *

Jackson was one of the most perfect political manipulators and machine-builders this country ever saw, and he had so perfected his machine at the close of his second term that he was able to name as his successor and the heir of his policies, Martin Van Buren, of New York, a man who had been one of Jackson’s most valued lieutenants from the first, an astute politician, but not remarkable in any way, nor able to impress himself upon the country.  He announced at his inauguration that it was his intention, to tread in the footsteps of his “illustrious predecessor,” but none for a moment imagined that he was big enough to fill Jackson’s shoes.  Indeed, Jackson, was by far the most important figure at the inauguration.