A dark picture--and yet only darker than similar pictures in years to follow because, in 1829, the policy was new and caught the office-holders unprepared. So gloomy has the picture been painted that the student of the times is prepared to learn of a general massacre of the placemen. There was no such massacre--no such massacre as followed the election of Lincoln. One is prepared to hear that all the enemies of Jackson were driven from office, but, as a matter of fact, the majority of the Federal office-holders during his régime were unmolested. This could not be said of Roosevelt’s Administration, nor of Cleveland’s. The exact number of removals during the first year of Jackson’s Administration cannot be determined with precision. Schouler,[194] while making no attempt definitely to fix the number, says that “some have placed the number as high as two thousand.” In view of the evidence of contemporaries available, it does seem that a fairly accurate idea should be obtained. It is interesting to observe in this connection that while Jackson’s enemies were dealing in sweeping generalities, his defenders were furnishing figures. And among the defenders none is more reliable than Thomas H. Benton, whose veracity or personal honesty has never been impeached or questioned, and he tells us[195] that there were whole classes of office-holders that were not molested; that those whose functions were of a judicial nature were not disturbed, and that in the departments at Washington a majority remained opposed to Jackson through his two Administrations. More important still--he tells us that Jackson not only left a majority of his enemies in office, but that in some instances he actually reappointed personal and political enemies where they were “especially efficient officers.” And he lays stress upon the point that where men, who had bitterly fought Jackson in the election, were not reappointed, a hue and cry was raised that they had been denied a right. Corroborating this, we have the evidence of Amos Kendall,[196] who wrote, after the Administration had been in power a year and a half: “He [Jackson] is charged with having turned out of office all who were opposed to him, when a majority of the office-holders in Washington are known to be in favor of his rivals. In that city the removals have been but one seventh of those in office, and most of them for bad conduct and character. In the Post-Office Department, toward which have been directed the heaviest complaints, the removals have been only about one sixteenth; in the whole Government, one eleventh.” And to the evidence of both Benton and Kendall, either one of whom would have been incapable of deliberate falsehood, we may add the less reliable, because more prejudiced, evidence of Isaac Hill, given in a public speech at Concord in the late summer of 1829. “It is worthy of observation,” he said, “that at least two thirds of the offices of profit at the seat of the