At this time he was in his fifty-fourth year, with no taste for the trickery and intrigues of politics, and he asked nothing better for his leisure hours than meditative tramps through the woods, a canter on his horse, a volume of poetry or history, or the delights of his home, presided over by the sister of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” An ardent Catholic, he was strict in the observance of his religious duties. Always vehement in his views, and uncompromising in his convictions, he was almost unpleasantly decisive in the expression of his political opinions. Such was his lofty conception of official propriety that while in office he was to refuse to accept the slightest token of appreciation from people with whom he had official relations.[333] He had all the courtesy and courtliness of his culture, all the caution of the painstaking lawyer, and all the circumspection of the man jealous of his honor. He was to become the most virile assistant of Jackson in the bitterest fight of his Presidency, the most trusted of his Cabinet, because the most like Jackson in the vigor of his blows. VI To describe Lewis Cass as an American politician would be damning with faint praise, for he was something infinitely more and greater--he was an empire-builder of the company of Clive and Rhodes, one of the most robust figures in American history. His first remembered view of the world was that of being held in his mother’s arms, and looking out the windows of his New Hampshire home upon the bonfires blazing in celebration of the ratification of the Constitution. Crossing the Alleghanies on foot, with a knap-sack on his back, sleeping beneath the stars, his Americanism had expanded in the contemplation of the magnitude of the Republic. Riding the circuit, as Western lawyers did in those days, he was a witness of the stubborn battles against the wilderness, and he had enough imagination to see, in the rough men wielding axes, Homeric figures. And it was while pursuing his lonely way through the virgin forests of Ohio that he found time for the assimilation of his reading and learned to be the independent and courageous thinker he became. He had established a sound reputation at the bar, when the War of 1812 added that of a gallant and brilliant soldier. To him especially are we indebted for the shameful story of Hull’s cowardly surrender of Detroit--an act so maddening that Cass broke his sword in protest. But his reputation as lawyer and soldier pales by comparison with the reputation he was to make as an empire-builder.