The people took the work of politics into their own keeping, and the leaders became followers.
George Julian
The Public Record
George Washington Julian was a politician, lawyer, and writer from Indiana who served in the United States House of Representatives during the 19th century. A leading opponent of slavery, Julian was the Free Soil Party's candidate for vice president in the 1852 election and was a prominent Radical Republican during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era.
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It rallied the Whig masses like a grand battle-cry.
The efforts to belittle his merits and defile his good name became systematic, and degenerated into the most unpardonable personal abuse and political defamation.
He was unquestionably honest and patriotic, and the fact that he was a poor man, and a plain farmer of the West, could properly form no objection to his character or his fitness for the Presidency.
He was a man of undoubted bravery, and had made a most honorable record, both as a soldier and a civilian, upon ample trial in both capacities.
Something more than empty promises and windy declamation was necessary, and that something, in an evil hour, was supplied by the Democrats themselves.
In the light of this fact alone, it is impossible to account for the perfectly unbounded and irrepressible enthusiasm which swept over the land during the campaign, and so signally routed the forces of Democracy.
They seemed totally unconscious of the fact that human nature is essentially the same in all parties, and that a mere change of men without any change of system would be fruitless.
The system of public plunder inaugurated by Jackson was in full blast, and an organized effort to reform it was the real need of the hour; but here was the weak point of the Whigs.
He was the most conspicuous public rascal of his time, but was far from being alone in his odious notoriety.
Politicians like George Julian
