But what of Jackson? If, as one writer has said, Clay was one of the favorites of the West, Jackson was the West itself. "While Clay was able to voice, with statesmanlike ability, the demand for economic legislation to promote her interests, and while he exercised an extraordinary fascination by his personal magnetism and his eloquence, he never became the hero of the great masses of the West; he appealed rather to the more intelligent--to the men of business and of property." π Jackson, however, was the very personification of the contentious, self-confident, nationalistic democracy of the interior. He could make no claim to statesmanship. He had held no important legislative or administrative position in his State, and his brief career in Congress was entirely without distinction. He was a man of action, not a theorist, and his views on public questions were, even as late as 1820, not clear cut or widely known. In a general way he represented the school of Randolph and Monroe, rather than that of Jefferson and Madison. He was a moderate protectionist, because he believed that domestic manufactures would make the United States independent of European countries in time of war. On the Bank and internal improvements his mind was not made up, although he was inclined to regard both as unconstitutional. π Turner, Rise of the New West, p. 188. Jackson's attitude toward the leading political personalities of the time left no room for doubt. He supported Monroe in 1816 and in 1820 and continued on friendly terms with him notwithstanding the President's failure on certain occasions to follow his advice. Among the new contenders for the presidency the one he disliked most was Crawford. "As to Wm. H. Crawford," he wrote to a friend in 1821, "you know my opinion. I would support the Devil first." Clay, also, he disliked--partly out of recollection of the Kentuckian's censorious attitude during the Seminole debates, partly because of the natural rivalry between the two men for the favor of the western people. Clay fully reciprocated by refusing to believe that "killing 2500 Englishmen at New Orleans" qualified Jackson for the "various difficult and complicated duties of the chief magistracy." Toward Adams, Jackson was not ill disposed; before he decided to permit his own name to be used, he said that he would give his support in 1824 to the New Englander--unless one other person should be brought forward. That person was Calhoun, for whom, among all the candidates of the day, he thus far had the warmest regard.