"Let the people rule"--such was the reply that Andrew Jackson made to the coalition of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams which made the latter President. And Andrew Jackson was an interesting man in 1825. He was to be the leader of the great party of the West which was forming for the overthrow of the old political and social order. Born in a cabin on the southern frontier in 1767 and reared in the midst of poverty during the "hard times" of the Revolution, Jackson had had little opportunity to acquire the education and polish which so distinguished the leaders of the old Jeffersonian party. After a season of teaching school and studying law in Salisbury, North Carolina, he emigrated, in 1788, to Tennessee, where he soon became a successful attorney, and a few years later a United States Senator. But public life in Philadelphia proved as unattractive as school-teaching had been; he returned to the frontier life of his adopted State and was speedily made a judge, and as such he sometimes led _posses_ to enforce his decrees. During the second war with England he made a brilliant campaign against the Creek Indians, who had sided with the British, and gained the reputation of being the mortal enemy of the aborigines, a reputation which added greatly to his popularity in a community which believed that the "only good Indian is a dead Indian." At the close of the war, when most men were expecting news that the British had conquered the lower Mississippi Valley and that the Union was breaking to pieces, he proved to be the one American general who could "whip the troops who had beaten Napoleon." The battle of New Orleans made Jackson an international character, and the West was ready to crown him a hero and a savior of the nation. Nor did his arbitrary conduct in the Seminole War, or later, when he was Governor of Florida, injure him in a region where Indians, Spaniards, and Englishmen had few rights which an American need respect. The attacks of Henry Clay in the House of Representatives, and of William H. Crawford in the Cabinet, were regarded as political maneuvers. When, therefore, Jackson offered himself in 1823 as a candidate for the Presidency, most Western men welcomed him, fearing only that his age and his delicate health, of which he had said too much in public, might cut him off before he could render his country the great service of which they considered him capable. The politicians, especially those who followed Henry Clay, did their utmost to defeat him, and the votes of the West were divided almost evenly between the two backwoods rivals. But when it became clear in 1825 that Speaker Clay of the House of Representatives had added his influence to that of John Quincy Adams in order to prevent Jackson from winning, Western men everywhere made his cause their cause. "Let the people rule" became a battle-cry which was taken up in every frontier State from Georgia to Illinois.