"[Footnote: Webster, Writings (National ed.), XVII.,
371.] At length the frontier, in the person of its leader, had found
a place in the government. This six-foot backwoodsman, angular,
lantern-jawed, and thin, with blue eyes that blazed on occasion;
this choleric, impetuous, Scotch-Irish leader of men; this expert
duelist and ready fighter; this embodiment of the contentious,
vehement, personal west, was in politics to stay.[Footnote: For
other appreciations, see Babcock, Am. Nationality, chap, xvii.;
MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chaps, ii., xviii.(Am. Nation,
XIII., XV.).] In the War of 1812, by the defeat of the Indians of
the Gulf plains, he made himself the conqueror of a new province for
western settlement, and when he led his frontier riflemen to the
victory of New Orleans he became the national hero, the self-made
man, the incarnation of the popular ideal of democracy. The very
rashness and arbitrariness which his Seminole campaign displayed
appealed to the west, for he went to his object with the relentless
directness of a frontiersman.
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