have been disinterested. Indeed, it was plainly intimated to him that,
if he gave the Presidency to General Jackson, General Jackson would
make him his heir apparent, or, in other words, his Secretary of
State.

The anger of General Jackson at his disappointment was not the blind
and wild fury of his earlier days; it was a deeper, a deadlier wrath,
which he governed and concealed in order to wreak a feller vengeance.
On the evening of the day on which the election in the House occurred
there was a levee at the Presidential mansion, which General Jackson
attended. Who, that saw him dart forward and grasp Mr. Adams cordially
by the hand, could have supposed that he then entirely believed that
Mr. Adams had stolen the Presidency from him by a corrupt bargain with
Mr. Clay? Who could have supposed that he and his friends had been,
for fourteen days, hatching a plot to blast the good name of Mr. Adams
and Mr. Clay, by spreading abroad the base insinuation that Clay had
been bought over to the support of Adams by the promise of the first
place in the Cabinet? Who could have supposed that, on his way home to
Tennessee, while the newspapers were paragraphing his magnanimity in
defeat, as shown by his behavior at the levee, he would denounce Adams
and Clay, in bar-rooms and public places, as guilty of a foul compact
to frustrate the wishes of the people?

It was calumny's masterpiece. It was a rare stroke of art to get an
old dotard of a member of Congress to publish, twelve days _before_
the election, that Mr. Clay had agreed to vote for Mr. Adams, and that
Mr. Adams had agreed to reward him by the office of Secretary of
State. When the vote had been given and the office conferred, how
plausible, how convincing, the charge of bargain!