The foregoing is from a three-column editorial which appeared during the very week that Jackson was in Jonesboro, and only about two days previous to his reception in that town. Eight newspapers that had theretofore supported Jackson immediately followed the lead of the _Courier and Enquirer_, took the names of Jackson and Van Buren from their mast-heads, and went over to the support of Nicholas Biddle and the banks, on the ground that the President had lost his mind and his “former energy of character”; but they all lived long enough to find out how the people of Jonesboro received the slander,[U] and also to learn that the whole country knew that they had been hired to traduce the life, character, abilities and public services of this great soldier, statesman and patriot, and to have the finger of indignant, honest scorn point them out as traitors to the cause and slanderers of Andrew Jackson. Space has been given to this reception at Jonesboro for the reason that it took place during the period of ten days within which nine or ten of the newspapers in the east which had been supporting Jackson suddenly discovered that he had “lost his former energy of character and independence of mind,” and was so “enfeebled by age” that his re-election would endanger the happiness of the people and the “sacred charter of liberty.” This was nothing more nor less than the first move in the conspiracy that was formed to defeat his re-election and destroy him. These newspapers had been bought, the price paid and the trade closed, some time after Jackson’s nomination on the 21st of May preceding, at Baltimore; but they were instructed to reserve their opening fire upon him until an opportune time. It was ascertained that he was about to visit the Hermitage, and that he was going “overland” down across Virginia and on through Tennessee. When he was about midway on this journey, with no telegraph or fast mail communication to give him information, these “bushwhackers” fired on his character, his integrity and his administration, and yet protested in the same editorials that they did not intend to “impeach his patriotism or his integrity.” The cold-blooded, savage brutality of this conspiracy; its “lying in wait,” concealment in ambush for weeks, to catch the victim away from home, out in the interior on a long journey, and then assault and attempt to assassinate his character, is without parallel in American political warfare. But the people could not be bought, deceived, driven nor intimidated. Of the popular vote cast in the election, that year, Jackson received 687,502, and Clay 530,189. Jackson carried seventeen out of twenty-four states, and received 219 out of 288 electoral votes.