George Julian

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.

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.

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.

Something more than empty promises and windy declamation was necessary, and that something, in an evil hour, was supplied by the Democrats themselves.

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.

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.

The efforts to belittle his merits and defile his good name became systematic, and degenerated into the most unpardonable personal abuse and political defamation.

It rallied the Whig masses like a grand battle-cry.

The people took the work of politics into their own keeping, and the leaders became followers.

Come ye who, whatever betide her, To Freedom have sworn to be true, Prime up with a cup of hard cider, And drink to old Tippecanoe.

Parched corn men can't stand it much longer, Enough is as much as we'll bear; With Tip at our head, in October, We'll tumble Van out of the chair.

Then ho! for March fourth, forty-one, boys, We'll shout till the heavens' arched blue Shall echo hard cider and fun, boys, Drink, drink, to old Tippecanoe.

The movement of 1840 was necessarily transient and provisional, while underneath its clatter and nonsense was a real issue.

It was unrecognized by both parties, but it made its advent, and the men who pointed its way quietly served notice upon the country of their ulterior purposes.

In 1837 Lovejoy had been murdered in Alton, Illinois, and his assassins compared by the Mayor of Boston to the patriots of the Revolution.

In 1838 a pro-slavery mob had set fire to Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, and defied the city authorities in this service of slavery.

President Jackson and Amos Kendall, his Postmaster General, had openly set the Constitution at defiance by justifying the rifling of the mails and the suppression of the circulation of anti-slavery newspapers in the South.

Channing had published his prophetic letter to Henry Clay, on the annexation of Texas, in 1837, and awakened a profound interest in the slavery question on both sides of the Atlantic.

We had been disgraced by two Florida wars, caused by the unconstitutional espousal of slavery by the General Government.

President Van Buren had dishonored his administration and defied the moral sense of the civilized world by his efforts to prostitute our foreign policy to the service of slavery and the slave trade.

To choose between them was to betray the cause.

Van Buren had attempted to shelter the slave trade under the national flag.

He had allied himself to the enemies of the right of petition and the freedom of debate, as the means of conciliating the South.

He had taken sides with Jackson in his lawless interference with the mails at the bidding of slave-holders.

The times are bad, and want curing; They are getting past all enduring; Let us turn out Martin Van Buren, And put in old Tippecanoe.