Benton, Thomas Hart, 1782-1858; Legislators -- United States -- Biography
concealed but still existent caste antagonism to a man of Jackson's
birth and bringing up. In fact, neither side, in spite of all their loud
talk of American Republicanism, had yet mastered enough of its true
spirit to be able to see that so long as public officers did their whole
duty to all classes alike, it was not in the least the affair of their
constituents whether they chose to spend their hours of social
relaxation in their shirt-sleeves or in dress coats.
The change was a great one; it was not a change of the policy under
which the government was managed, as in Jefferson's triumph, but of the
men who controlled it. The two great democratic victories had little in
common; almost as little as had the two great leaders under whose
auspices they were respectively won,--and few men were ever more unlike
than the scholarly, timid, and shifty doctrinaire, who supplanted the
elder Adams, and the ignorant, headstrong, and straightforward soldier,
who was victor over the younger. That the change was the deliberate
choice of the great mass of the people, and that it was one for the
worse, was then, and has been ever since, the opinion of most thinking
men; certainly the public service then took its first and greatest step
in that downward career of progressive debasement and deterioration
which has only been checked in our own days. But those who would,
off-hand, decry the democratic principle on this account would do well
to look at the nearly contemporaneous career of the pet heroes of a
trans-Atlantic aristocracy before passing judgment. A very charming
English historian of our day[1] has compared Wellington with Washington;
it would have been far juster to have compared him with Andrew Jackson.
Both were men of strong, narrow minds and bitter prejudices, with few
statesmanlike qualities, who, for brilliant military services, were
raised to the highest civil positions in the gift of the state. The
feeling among the aristocratic classes of Great Britain in favor of the
Iron Duke was nearly as strong and quite as unreasonable as was the
homage paid by their homelier kinsfolk across the Atlantic to Old
Hickory. Wellington's military successes were far greater, for he had
more chances; but no single feat of his surpassed the remarkable victory
won against his ablest lieutenant and choicest troops by a much smaller
number of backwoods riflemen under Andrew Jackson. As a statesman
Wellington may have done less harm than Jackson, for he had less
influence; but he has no such great mark to his credit as the old
Tennessean's attitude toward the Nullifiers. If Jackson's election is a
proof that the majority is not always right, Wellington's elevation may
be taken as showing that the minority, or a fraction thereof, is in its
turn quite as likely to be wrong.
[1: Justin McCarthy.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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