his friends that “the combinations for the elevation of General Jackson were nearly complete.” Martin Van Buren, who in the last presidential election had been the great leader of the Crawford forces in New York, but now, discerning in General Jackson the coming man, was traveling through the Southern States in the interest of this candidate, wrote mysteriously to some gentlemen at Raleigh, who had invited him to a public dinner: “The spirit of encroachment has assumed a new and far more seductive aspect, and can only be resisted by the exercise of uncommon virtues.”
Thus the leaders of the Jackson movement worked busily to excite the popular mind with spectral visions of unprecedented corruption prevailing, and of terrible dangers hanging over the country; and their newspapers, led by a central organ which they had established at Washington, the “Telegraph,” edited by Duff Green, day after day hurled the most reckless charges of profligacy and abuse of power at the administration. They also brought the organization of local committees as electioneering machinery to a perfection never known until then, and these committees were kept constantly active in feeding the agitation. Repeating, by the press and in speech, without cessation, the cry of bargain and corruption, and usurpation of power; never withdrawing a charge, even if ever so conclusively refuted, but answering only with new accusations equally terrific, — they gradually succeeded in making a great many well-meaning
