The time was now at hand, however, when Andrew Jackson would have a chance to show how he could serve his country. At the age of forty-five he had commenced no career. He was a prominent man in his State, but he had held no political offices in it, and had not, so far as we know, been active in any kind of public affairs, although we infer that he had discharged all his duties as general of militia. He had shown himself a faithful friend and an implacable enemy. Every man who has this character is self-centred. He need not be vain or conceited. Jackson was not vain or conceited. He never showed any marked selfishness. He had a great deal of amour propre. All things which interested him at all took on some relation to his person, and he engaged his personality in everything which interested him. An opinion or a prejudice became at once for him a personal right and interest. To approve it and further it was to win his gratitude and friendship. To refute or oppose it was to excite his animosity. There was an intensity and vigor about him which showed lack of training. His character had never been cultivated by the precepts and discipline of home, or by the discipline of a strict and close society, in which extravagances of behavior and excess of amour propre are promptly and severely restrained by harsh social penalties. There is, to be sure, a popular philosophy that home breeding and culture are of no importance. The fact, however, is not to be gainsaid that true honor, truthfulness, suppres

sion of undue personal feeling, self-control, and courtesy are inculcated best, if not exclusively, by the constant precept and example, in earliest childhood, of high-bred parents and relatives. There is nothing on earth which it costs more labor to produce than a high-bred man. It is also indisputable that home discipline and training ingrain into the character of men the most solid and valuable elements, and that, without such training, more civilization means better food and clothes rather than better men. It is characteristic of barbarians to put their personality always at stake, and not to distinguish the man who disputes their notions from the man who violates their rights. It is possible, however, that the military virtues may flourish where moral and social training are lacking. Jackson was unfortunate in that the force of his will and the energy of his executive powers had never been disciplined, but the outbreak of the second war with England afforded him an arena on which his faults became virtues.

CHAPTER II

THE CREEK WAR AND THE WAR WITH ENGLAND

IN no place in the world was Napoleon more ardently admired than in the new States of this country. The popular enthusiasm about him in those States lasted long after he was rated much more nearly at his true value everywhere else in the world. The second war with England was brought on by the policy, the opinions, and the feelings of the South and West, represented by a young and radical element in the Jefferson party. The opinion in the South and West, in 1811 and 1812, was that Napoleon was about to unite the Continent for an attack on England, in which he was sure to succeed, and that he would thus become master of Europe and the world. It was thought that it would be well to be in at the death on his side. It is not necessary to point out in any detail the grounds for this opinion which might have been put forward at that time, or to show the partial and distorted information on which it was founded. It is certain that the persons who held this notion were very ill-informed on European politics, and their opinions were strongly biassed by party conflicts at home. For twenty

years the domestic politics of the United States had been organized on sympathy with one or the other of the belligerent parties in Europe. This country was weak in a military point of view, but commercially it would have been a great advantage to either belligerent to have free intercourse with the United States, and to keep his enemy from it. The English policy towards the United States was arrogant and insolent. That of France was marked by duplicity and chicanery. Party spirit here took possession of the people to such an extent that the federalists made apology for any injury from England, no matter how insolent, and the democrats could not see any wrong in the acts of Napoleon, in spite of the evident fact that he was using this country for his own selfish purposes while cajoling it with shameless lies. The course of the weak neutral between two such belligerents was very difficult.

Washington succeeded in maintaining neutrality by Jay's treaty, but at the cost of bitter hostility

home. Adams was driven to the verge of war with France by his party, but succeeded in averting war, although his party was destroyed by the reaction. Jefferson cannot be said to have had an plan. The statesmen of his party tried to act on the belligerents by destructive measures against domestic commerce and industry, chastising ourselves, as Plumer said, with scorpions, in order to beat the enemy with whips. They tried one measure after another. No measure had a rational

origin or effect calculated and adjusted to the circumstances of the case. Each was a new blunder.

The republican rulers in France, in 1792, could do nothing better for a man who claimed protection from the Jacobin mobs than to put him in prison, so that the mob could not get at him. Jefferson's embargo offered the same kind of protection to American shipping. Before the embargo, merchants and ship-owners went to sea at great risk of capture and destruction; after it, they stayed at home and were sure of ruin. Jefferson has remained a popular idol, and has never been held to the responsibility which belonged to him for his measures. The alien and sedition laws were not nearly so unjust and tyrannical1 as the laws for enforcing the embargo, and they did not touch one man where the embargo laws touched hundreds. The commercial war was a device which, if it had been sensible and practical, would have attained national ends by sacrificing one group of interests and laying a much inferior burden on others. New England was denounced for want of patriotism because it resisted the use of its interests for national purposes, but as soon as the secondary effects of the embargo on agriculture began to be felt, the agricultural States raised a cry which overthrew the device. Yet criticisms which are justified by the most conclusive testimony of history fall harmlessly from Jefferson's armor of popular platitudes

1 See Carey's Olive Branch, page 50, for the opinion of a demoerat on these laws after party spirit had cooled down.