The people might have been divided into two great classes according to the opinion of Jackson which was entertained in 1822. The more sober and intelligent considered him a violent, self-willed, ignorant, and untrained man. They thought that he had perhaps the soldier’s virtues and that he had done the country good service as a soldier but they doubted if he had the first qualification of a ruler, _viz._, to know how to obey. They thought him quarrelsome, vain, untutored in the forms of civilized life which teach men to ignore much, to endure more, and to reserve the stake of personal feeling and personal struggle for the last and highest emergencies. They perceived, on the contrary, that he never distinguished great things from small, especially where his own pride was involved, and that he had no reserve at all about throwing his personality into unseemly controversies, which he never shunned but seemed to like. I have already said that these personal criminations and recriminations were common at the time; Mr. Webster is the only prominent public man of the time who succeeded in avoiding newspaper controversies, and he did not altogether escape altercations in the Senate. Public men were continually scenting attacks on their character and setting vigorously to work to vindicate the same, not perceiving that such vindications always derogate from the man who makes them. This much ought to be said in excuse for General Jackson if this fault was especially prominent in him. You may imagine how incredible it seemed to persons who formed this estimate of Jackson that any one could soberly propose him for the chair which had hitherto been filled by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The Federalists of New England had had little affection or admiration for the last three Presidents, but they had never been ashamed of them as public men.