Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1884 — Old Hickory. [ARTICLE]

Old Hickory.

It had been quite essential to the self-respect of the new republic, at the outset, that it should have at its head men who had coped with European statesmen on their own soil and not been discomfited. This was the cast with each of the early successors oi Washington, and, in v.ew of h.s manifest superiority, this advantage was not needed. Perhaps it was in a different way a sign of self-respect that the new republic should at last turn from this tradition, and take boldly from the ranks a strong and ill-trained leader, to whom all European precedent—and, indeed, all other precedent—counted for nothing. In Jackson, moreover, there first appeared upon our national stage the since familiar figure of the self-made man. Other Presidents hail sprung from a modest origin, but nobody had made an especial point of it. Nobody had urged Washington for o.lice because he had been a surveyor's lad; nobody had voted for Adams merely because stately old ladies designated him as “that cobbler’s son.” But when Jackson came into office the people had just had almost a surfeit of regular training in their Chief Magistrates. There was a certain zest iu the thought of a change, and the nation certainly had it. It must be remembered that J ackson was in many ways far above the successive modern imit tors who have posed in his image. He was narrow, ignorant, violent, unreasonable; he punished his enemies and rewarded his friends. But he was, on the other hand—and his worst opponents hardly denied it—cliasto, honeot, truthful, aud sincere. It was not commonly charged upon him that he enr.ched himself at the public expense, or that ho deliberately invented falsehoods. And as he was for a time more bitterly hated than any one who ever occupied his high office, we may be very sure that these things would have been charged had it been possible. In this respect the contrast was enormous between Jackson and his imitators, and it explains his prolonged influence. He never was found out or exposed before the world, because there was nothing to detect or unveil; his merits and demerits were as visible as liis long, narrow, firmly set features, or as the old military stock that encircled his neck. There he was, always fuilv revealed; everybody could see him; the people might take him or leave him—and they never left him. Moreover, there was after the eight years of Monroe and the four years of Adams an immense popular demand for something piquant and even amusing, and this quality they always had from Jackson. There \v*s nothing in the least melodramatic about him; ho never posed or attitudinized —it would have required too much patience—but he was always piquant. There was formerly a good deal of discussion as to who wrote the once famous “Jack Downing” letters, but we might almost say that they wrote themselves. Nobody was ever less of a humorist than Andrew Jackson, and it was therefore the more essential that lie should be the cause of humor in others. It was simply inevitable that during his progresses through the country there should be pome amusing shadow evoked, some Yankee parody of the man, such as came from two or three quarters under the name of Jack Downing. The various records of Monroe’s famous tours are as tame as the speeches which these expeditions brought forth, and John Quincy Adams never made any popular demonstrations to chronicle; but wherever Jackson went there went the other Jack, the crude first-fruits of what is uow known through the world as “American humors.” Jack Downing was Mark Twain and Hosea Biglow and Artemus Ward in one. The impe uous President enraged many and delighted many, but it is something to know that under him a serious people first found that it knew how to laugh.— T. \Y. Higginson, in Harper’s Magazine.