were jubilant. Letters of congratulation came pouring in upon him. Webster was lavish in his praise of Clay's dinner speech at Lexington, and thought General Jackson would never recover from the blow he had received. Was it possible that, in the face of this overwhelming evidence, General Jackson should refuse to retract his charges, or that anybody in the United States should still believe them to be true, and have the hardihood to repeat them? It was. General Jackson did not retract. His whole moral sense was subjugated by the dogged belief that a man who seriously disagreed with him must necessarily be a very bad man, capable of any villainy, and must be put down. He attempted no reply to Buchanan's letter and Clay's addresses, but, as we shall see, seventeen years later, at a most critical period in Clay's public life, when Carter Beverly, in a regretful letter to Clay, had retracted all aspersions upon him, Jackson repeated the slander and reaffirmed his belief in it. Neither did General Jackson's friends remain silent; on the contrary, they lustily proclaimed that Buchanan's letter had proved Jackson's charge, and that now there could be no further doubt about it. Among the masses of the people, too, who did not read long explanations and sift evidence, especially in Pennsylvania and in the West and South, the bargain and corruption cry remained as powerful as ever. It became with them a sort of religious belief that, in the year 1824, General Jackson, a guileless soldier,
