Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1884 — “Old Hickory’s” Manners. [ARTICLE]

“Old Hickory’s” Manners.

For the social life of Washington the President had one advantage which was altogether unexpected, and seemed difficult of explanation by anything in his earlier career. He had at his command the most courteous aud agreeable manners. Ev n before the election oi Adams, Daniel Webster had written to his brother: “Gen. Jackson’s maimers are better than those of any of the candidates. He is grave, mild, and reserved. My wife is for him decidedly.” And long after, when the President was to pass in review before those who were perhaps his most implacable opponents, the ladies of Boston, we have the testimony of the latuJosiah Quincy, in his “Figures from the Past,” that tue personal bearing of this obnoxious official was most unwillingly approved. Mr. (Quincy was detailed by Gov. Lincoln, on whose military staff he was, to attend President Jackson everywhere when visiting Boston in 1833; and this narrator testifies that, with every prejudice against Jackson, lie found him essentially “a knightly personage prejudiced, narrow, mistaken on many points, it might be, but vigorously a gentleman in his high sense of honor and in the natural straightforward courtesies which are easily distinguished from the veneer of policy." (Sitting erect on his horse, a thin, stiff type of military strength, he carried with him in the streets a bearing of such dignity that staid old Bostonians who had refused even to look upon him from their windows would finally be coaxed into taking one peep, and would then hurriedly bring forward their little daughters to wate their handkerchiefs. He wrought, Mr. (Quincy declares, “a mysterious charm upon old and young;" showed, although in feeble health, a great consideration for others, and was in private a really agreeable companion. It appears from tnese reminiscences that the President was not merely the cause of wit in others, but now and then appreciated it himself, and that he used to listen with delight to the reading of the “Jack Downing” letters, laughing hearti y sometimes, and declaring: “The Vice President must have written that. Depend upon it, Jack Downing is only Van Buren in masquerade.” It is a curious fact that the satirist is already the better remembered of the two, although Van Buren was in his day so powerful as to preside over the official patronage of the nation, and to be called the “Little Magician.”— T. W. Rigginson, in Harper's Mtgazine.