Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/138



Andrew Jackson left office on March 4, 1837, the great financial explosion had not yet occurred. The old hero went out in a halo of glory; but the disastrous conflagration broke out immediately behind him, and seemed to singe his very heels. The man to whom he left his fearful legacy, Martin Van Buren, was the first trained “machine politician,” in the modern sense of the term, elevated to the presidency. He had made his studies in the school of New York politics, and had become the ruling spirit of the renowned Albany Regency. His career gave color to the charge that he permitted no fixed principles to stand in the way of his personal advancement. He had been a Clinton and an anti-Clinton man. He had, as a legislator in New York, been in favor of giving colored citizens the right to vote; he had been against the admission of Missouri as a Slave State; he had helped to elect Rufus King, a leader of the Anti-slavery Federalists, to the Senate of the United States; and then he became the foremost of the “Northern men with Southern principles.” He had, in the New York Convention of 1821, opposed