contempt for law, as Mr. Jefferson said, when he was upon the frontier, hampered by treaties and instructions; but his ideals were not those of the law-breaker. They were those of the ardent patriot. The peril of the country lay in the fact that he chose to disregard precedent and to interpret all laws for himself,—the law of the constitution no less than the law of the statute book.

And so there was almost a clean sweep of the federal offices to make room for General Jackson's friends, and secure proper persons to execute General Jackson's purposes. That the men dismissed had been long in office he deemed an additional argument for their discharge rather than an argument for their retention. Long terms of service he thought undemocratic. They slackened diligence, he believed, and made office-holders too carelessly secure. No doubt they fostered corruption, too. He did not himself conduct the proscription; he let those whom he trusted conduct it in his name. By the time the first Congress of his term assembled (December 7, 1829) it was estimated that fully a thousand federal officials had been removed, as against seventy-three at the most in all the previous history of the government. The Senate tried to stay the tide where it could, in its action on the nominations sent to it; but found the President imperious, irresistible, not to be gainsaid, and public opinion out-of-doors astonishingly ready to support and applaud him at every turn of the contest. "We give no reasons for our removals," said Mr. Van Buren; and apparently the mass of the voters wanted none. They were content to know that General Jackson was changing the government from top to bottom. Men without parts

or reputation of course got into office, in the general scramble. There could be little choice or deliberation in that wholesale process. The men appointed were for the most part men who had put themselves forward. There were very few men of any experience at all in federal administration, and many adventurers, to be found in the ranks of the new party. "Very few reputable appointments have been made," Mr. Adams, the ruthless General's predecessor in office, set down in his journal, "and those confined to persons who were indispensably necessary to the office." "The appointments are exclusively of violent partisans, and editor of a scurrilous and slanderous newspaper is provided for."

every

It was only fair to remember that the new party drew of necessity upon its ranks, whether for ordinary officials or for leaders. If the minor office holders were new men, so were their chiefs also, who stood close about the President himself. The cabinet which General Jackson chose seemed conventional enough, indeed, for a party so recently made up. Mr. Van Buren had left the office of Governor of New York to become Secretary of State. He had been merely a local politician, no doubt, though he had served a term in the Senate, and had come but the other day into national prominence; but he was at least as well known as many another cabinet officer before him. The other heads of Departments, though even less generally known to the nation than he was, had played a public part in affairs, in Congress and out of it, and had been chosen for reasons familiar enough in politics. Major John H. Eaton, of Tennessee, was selected to be Secretary of War, because he was a trusted personal friend of the President's;

the Secretaries of the Treasury and of the Navy and the Attorney General owed their places to the fact that they were the friends of Mr. Calhoun, the Vice President, who stood at the front of the President's party in the South. The Postmaster General had been a candidate for the governorship of Kentucky in the Jackson in

terest, and had been defeated by a nominee of the friends of Mr. Clay.

What was really singular and significant was, that these gentlemen did not, under General Jackson, form a real cabinet at all. The country presently learned that the President did not hold cabinet meetings: that he took counsel, when he felt in need of it, with private friends, some of whom had no recognized post or stand

ing in the government at all. Chief among these were one William B. Lewis, of Tennessee, a kinsman and neighbor of General Jackson's, and one Amos Kendall, a Massachusetts man now identified with Kentucky. It was Major Lewis who, more than any other man, had first forced him into candidacy for the presidency, who had set the stage for him at every turn of his political career, who had set afoot, superintended, fomented, and with an infinite art and diligence brought successfully to a head the many influences, public and private, which were to bring him finally into office and to the leadership of his party. General Jackson consulted and used him without in the least realizing that he had in him a consummate master of the arts whereby opinion is made and individual men are set forward in their ambition. He had made Major Lewis Second Auditor of the Treasury; but Lewis was not a man who played for himself. He played for Jackson, and loved every subtle turn of the game: used his gifts of management like one who played for his own hand, and yet remained a man of honor and served his friend more than he served himself. Amos Kendall was a master of the art political, not in action, but upon paper. He had gifts as a writer which could be turned to account in the composition of the most serious state papers. He caught the impressive tone of public business and mastered its calm way of reasoning as readily as he caught the tones of partisan controversy and spent his force in its bitter energy. He could frame a significant innuendo or prepare an editorial for the party press that bit as deep as anything that Tom. Paine or William Cobbett could have written. He seemed a statesman or a mere partisan by turns; it was difficult to

tell which he was either by nature or by choice. He was perhaps each in turn; but nothing out of the closet.

There were others of the "Kitchen Cabinet" besides: the editors of Jacksonian newspapers; but the heart

of it lay in Major Lewis and Mr. Kendall. Mr. Van Buren and Major Eaton, of Tennessee, the Secretary of War, were freely admitted into this inner circle; but not as members of the cabinet, only as personal friends and confidants of the President.