When Mr. Buchanan entered Congress there was no sectionalism to disturb the repose of the country. The Cabinet was a fair representation of the different sections, its members being from Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio, and Maryland. It remained the same, with one exception only, until Mr. Monroe went out of office in 1824.[6] It is not easy to trace among the public men of this period any fixed political doctrines such as afterwards came to distinguish the opposing parties. All that can be said is, that in the Middle States those who had been Republicans had a strong tendency to the Virginia principles of State Rights; but what these were, beyond a general tendency to watch and prevent undue expansion of the Federal powers, it would be difficult now to say. In Congress, most of the Eastern representatives were Free Traders, while those of the Middle States were in favor of moderate protection. Among the Southern members there was a disposition to follow a liberal policy in the administration of the government, which was aided by the ability and ambition of Mr. Calhoun, the Secretary of War. But among the members, chiefly confined to the Southwestern States, there was a compact knot of men who were called “Radicals,” in the political nomenclature of that period. It is hard to define them, but their distinctive policy appears to have been a steady resistance to all expenditures of public money, and a persistently strict construction of the Constitution. Thus there cannot be said to have been any well-defined parties at this period, such as the country has since been accustomed to. But they began to be formed on the questions relating to finance and the development of the internal resources of the country, which arose during Mr. Monroe’s Presidency, and continued to a later period. Men who had been Federalists and men who had been Republicans, during the previous administrations, passed into the one or the other of the subsequent parties, which assumed new designations, without much real historical connection with the old parties that had preceded them. The personal composition of the two Houses of Congress at this time presents many interesting names. In the Senate, Rufus King, who had been a Senator during Washington’s Administration, and Nathaniel Macon, who had been a Representative at the same time, gave a flavor of the formative period of the Republic. John Galliard and William Smith (of South Carolina) and James Brown (of Louisiana) were also among the older members. A somewhat younger class of men numbered among them Martin Van Buren, who succeeded General Jackson as President.