Jackson, then still a member of the Senate, said nothing; but he, together with fourteen other Senators, among them the leading Southerners, voted against consenting to the nomination. It was, however, confirmed by a majority of twelve, seven Senators being absent.
On the day of the inauguration, General Jackson had been one of the earliest of those who “took the hand” of President Adams, congratulating him upon his accession to power. The newspapers highly praised the magnanimity of the defeated candidate. But after the adjournment of the Senate, when Jackson was on his way to his home in Tennessee, his tone changed. Everywhere he was cordially received; and to every one willing to hear it, at public receptions, in hotels, on steamboats, he was ready to say that the will of the people had been fraudulently defeated, and that the presidential office had virtually been stolen from its rightful owner by a corrupt combination. This foreshadowed the presidential campaign of 1828. The cry was to be: “The rights of the people against bargain and corruption.”
Not having had the benefit of an official inquiry, Clay now tried to put down the calumny once and forever by an explicit statement of the case over his own signature. On March 26, not many days after he had become a member of the new administration, he published an address to his old constituents in Kentucky, in which he elaborately reviewed the whole story, conclusively refuted the
