“The issue is fairly made out: Shall the government or the people rule?” asked Andrew Jackson, and on that issue he appealed to the country in his memorable electoral campaign against Adams, in 1828. That was the bitterest Presidential contest that had ever been fought. Jackson was attacked with unexampled ferocity. One day at his Tennessee home, the Hermitage, his wife found him in tears. “Myself I can defend,” he said, pointing to a newspaper which he had been reading; “you I can defend; but now they have assailed even the memory of my mother.” And it was, in great part, her distress at the invective that was heaped upon her husband that caused the death of Mrs. Jackson just after the election. It was a pitched battle between the “classes” and the “masses.” As James Parton says, in his biography of Jackson: “Nearly all the talent, nearly all the learning, nearly all the ancient wealth, nearly all the business activity, nearly all the book-nourished intelligence, nearly all the silver-forked civilization of the country, united in opposition to General Jackson, who represented the country’s untutored instincts.” CHAPTER XIII. THE REVOLUTION IN 1776. Revolt from aristocracy and detestation of “caste” in politics, in religion, and in society, have been the key-notes of the whole history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. They were the incentives that first led men of that race to seek homes beyond the Atlantic, and have ever been the cardinal principles of the nation those pioneers founded. The westward movement began with that era of English history marked by the intolerable pretensions, in matters both of Church and State, of the Stuart monarchs. The doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” which cost Charles I. his head, was, with all that it meant, the grievance that drove from England the settlers of the American colonies. When James I., soon after his accession, was petitioned to allow liberty of assembling and of discussion to all classes and sects of his subjects, he replied that such a privilege “agrees with monarchy as well as God and the devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say: ‘It must be thus;’ then Dick shall reply and say: ‘Nay, marry, but we will have it thus;’ and, therefore, here I must say: ‘The king forbids.’” The king forbade, but the native spirit of English liberty did not acquiesce without a murmur. There were mutterings of the storm that was to burst upon his son and successor in the full fury of rebellion. The subservient Wentworth complained that “the very genius of this nation of people leads them always to oppose, both civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”