He was "impetuous, wilful,
high-spirited, daring, jealous, but, withal, a lovable man." For a
decade he had been the most conspicuous figure in the national House
of Representatives. He had raised the speakership to a high level of
importance and through its power had fashioned a set of issues,
reflective of western and middle-state ideas, upon which the politics
of the country turned for more than a quarter of a century. As
befitted a "great conciliator," he had admirers in every corner of the
land. Whether his strength could be sufficiently massed to yield
electoral results remained to be discovered.
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.
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