The portrait of Branch, which hangs in the Navy Department in Washington, suggests, in the slender profile and luminous eyes, the poet, rather than the politician. He is described by one who saw him often in his Washington days as “tall, well-proportioned, graceful in gestures, and affable and kindly in manner.”[167] He had the graciousness of the Southern aristocrat of the old school, and was devoted to the social standards and customs of his section. Strongly attached to his home and family, having the poet’s love of the artistic, he surrounded himself with beauty, and his home at Enfield was a comfortable and stately mansion surrounded by a smooth lawn, in the midst of gardens, orchards, and shade trees. His political career and the course of the Jackson Administration were to be greatly influenced by his devotion to his wife and daughters, and to his social ideals. In John McPherson Berrien, the Attorney-General, we have a character with whom history has played strange pranks. When he entered the Cabinet, he was conceded to be one of the most polished orators of his time and one of the famous lawyers of the South. His Washington début in the Supreme Court, in a case involving the seizure of an African slave ship, had been a spectacular triumph.[168] All contemporaries agree as to his extraordinary gifts of eloquence. Perley Poore describes him as “a polished and effective orator.”[169] Another contemporary found him “a model for chaste, free, beautiful elocution.”[170] Still another has it that “he spoke the court language of the Augustan age.”[171] Even the blasé John Marshall, who listened to Webster and Choate, was so impressed that he dubbed him “the honey-tongued Georgian youth.”[172] He had been in the Senate three years when a speech upon the tariff impelled the press of the period to describe him as “the American Cicero”--a designation that clung to him through life. The greatest speech made by any of the leaders of the Opposition on the Panama Mission was the constitutional argument of Berrien.[173] As a man he was cold and reserved, an aristocrat in manner, as in feeling. He made a virtue of not cultivating the multitude, scorned all compromise with his convictions, firmly believed in himself, and was not at all impressed with opposition. Utterly without tact or diplomacy, caustic and sarcastic, he incurred bitter enmities, but his admirers, who liked to compare him with Cicero, took pride in this weakness.[174] As a political leader, he was dictatorial and demanded obedience without question. The slightest hesitation on the part of his tried and truest friends was usually followed by coldness on his part. Selfish to a degree, he was always keen for his personal advancement.[175] Few more brilliant men have ever been Attorney-General of the United States.