His attitude toward his daughter-in-law and her son, and others, is well illustrated by a letter which he wrote her while he was President. He says in one of his letters to her:

"I was relieved this morning from great anxiety and solicitude by receiving your letter of the 28th ult. from Clarksville, informing me that you are all well and that my dear little Rachel improves, is in good health and growing finely. May that kind Providence to whom in your absence to me, I have resigned you all, continue to bless you all with every blessing this world can afford. It is late at night and I must close for the present. Pass my love to Andrew-cannot write him tonight, and kiss my dear sweet little pet for me, and believe me your affectionate father, Andrw Jackson.

"My regards to all the negroes who I know rejoice to see you at home. First leisure I will write you a long letter.

ANDREW JACKSON.

After the death of Mrs. Jackson which came so tragically the night before she was to start for the White House, the President was blessed with the devoted care of the two young women in his family who were like daughters. Mrs. Donelson kept a home for him in the White House and Sarah, a more retiring woman of Quaker birth, presided at the Hermitage. Like Washington, Jackson's affection was centered in his country estate, and he writes of the horses, crops, and farm interests as frequently as of affairs of state. Thus:

"MY DEAR SARAH

"By Major Lewis who leaves us on the 12th instant I send three pair of children shoes & two pair of stockings for my dear little Rachel & Andrew, which you will please present with a kiss from Grand papa to his children-they are the best I could get and will do them on their journey hither.

"I have not had a single line from Andrew, or any information from you since I left the Hermitage except what oral information I recd. from Mr. Cotson at Wythe. I am wearied with anxiety and disappointed expectation-by every mail I have expected some letters and have received none. Major Donelson has received two letters from Stocklynames the ill health of Emily & the children, but does not say a word about your or the babes health. I am fearful that my letters are troublesome to him. Therefore after the one that this to you is enclosed, I shall not write him again until I receive one from him.

19 Washington, November 8th, 1833. Andrew Jackson to his son.

"Accept my dear Sarah for you and the dear little ones my prayer for your health and happiness, and present the same to Andrew and believe me your affectionate father

Jackson was singularly blind to the faults of a friendto his enemies, however, he was generally unforgiving, or in the words of Van Buren, "conciliation of individuals formed the smallest, perhaps too small a part, of his policy." A conspicuous exception is to be found in the case of Thomas Hart Benton, United States Senator from Missouri. Benton and Jackson were living in Nashville when a quarrel broke out between them with the result that a fight occurred in which Jackson was shot in the shoulder by the younger brother of Benton; then Benton left Tennessee and went to Missouri, and, while Jackson was President and Benton was Senator, a resolution censuring Jackson was spread on the minutes of the Senate. Benton immediately gave notice that he would not rest until the resolution had been expunged from the minutes. It so happened that on the day that the bullet was removed from Jackson's shoulder Benton succeeded in having the resolution expunged from the minutes of the Senate.

If quarreling between President and Senate is a part of our institutional life, then Jackson ranks high, because throughout his two administrations he constantly fought with the Senate and won his fights. He gleamed with enthusiasm on the day of Van Buren's inauguration because the man whom the Senate had turned down had been elected President of the United States. And Chief Justice Taney who had likewise been turned down was engaged in administering the oath of office.

The leading biographer of Andrew Jackson has said:

"But with the majority of people his death was a genuine sorrow. To them he was a real hero, a personification of a great cause, and the passing of his influence was a national loss. . . Jackson's lack of education, his crude judgment in many affairs, his occasional outbreak of passion, his habitual hatred for those enemies with whom he had not made friends for party purposes, and his crude ideas of some political policies all lose some of their infelicity in the fact of his brave, frank, masterly

20 Andrew Jackson to Sarah Jackson, Washington, October 10th, 1834.

leadership of the democratic movement which then established itself in our life. This was his task; he was adapted to it; he did it faithfully, conscientiously, ably. Few American Presidents have better lived up to the demands of the movement which brought them into power.'

9921

Jackson in his career and in his policies personified America as the Land of Opportunity. Jefferson spent fifty years fighting for a democratic America, a land in which merit and capacity rather than birth or hereditary wealth should count. Jackson proved that such a land did exist. The great services of Washington aided by Hamilton, though well known, are probably beyond the power of full appreciation. A career of service beginning with the French and Indian War and culminating in the famous farewell address is almost unique in the annals of time. The fine spirit and the splendid work of Lincoln in preserving the Union are well-known from the immortal Gettysburg address and the first and second inaugurals. Standing between the founders of our Republic and Lincoln, the preserver of the Union, in many ways amazingly different, towers the figure of Andrew Jackson the great American leader of our democratic commonwealth representing our national character as has been well said by one in defining Americanism:

"Here, free from the domination of autocratic government and from the poisoning influences of decadent aristocracies, forgetting our fears and servile habits, we have elevated the best from all countries into a common possession-and called it Americanism." =

21 Bassett, p. 750.

P. P. Claxton: Americanization. Quoted from Philip Davis: Immigration and

Americanization, p. 621.

Doctor Johnson and the Occult

JOSEPH M. Beatty, Jr.

Goucher College.

Doctor Johnson characterized his century as "this age of inquiry and knowledge, when superstition is driven away, and omens and prodigies have lost their terror." In spite of this characterization, however, the period was almost as credulous as our own. In the newspapers and diaries of the time and in the pages of the indefatigable Boswell himself there is many a story that will match the most mysterious experience of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge. Old women were still ducked for witchcraft, and remote manor-houses retained without serious question their ancient ghosts. When Mary Tofts, the wife of a journeyman tailor, announced to the world that she had given birth to a litter of rabbits, even the court physician, Cyriacus Ahlers, believed her, and wished to obtain a pension for her.2 In 1762, the Cock-Lane Ghost held all London agog: the ignorant believed; the learned-among them Doctor Johnson-came to scoff and remained to investigate.

The story of the Cock-Lane Ghost is one of mingled roguery and credulity. Fannie L., a young woman from Norfolk, was induced by her brother-in-law, a widower named William Kent, to come to live with him at Greenwich. After she had lived with him there for a short time she made a will in his favor. She then moved to the home of the Parsons family in Cock-Lane, and shortly afterwards to a house in Bartlet Court, in the parish of Clerkenwell, London. Here, in January, 1760, she became ill with the smallpox and died. She was buried at St. John's Church, Clerkenwell, and her former companion received her fortune.3

1 The Idler, No. 11, in The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. A new edition, in twelve volumes, with An Essay On His Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq. London, 1806, vol. vii., p. 43.

2 W. C. Sydney: England and the English in the Eighteenth Century. In two volumes. London, 1891. Vol. 1, pp. 293-4.

The Gentleman's Magazine for 1762, p. 43.

1

At this time the head of the Parsons household was the officiating clerk of the ancient church of St. Sepulchre in London. Shortly after the death of the young woman from Norfolk, he announced that her spirit had taken possession of his daughter, a girl twelve years old. Frequently, while the girl was in bed, the spirit was supposed to communicate with its auditors by means of knockings and scratchings. One knock was thought to indicate an affirmative answer, two knocks, a negative. Scratching indicated displeasure. Among its disclosures the ghost made the charge that Kent was guilty of poisoning his sister-in-law; it said that it would not rest until the murderer was hanged. These phenomena and charges aroused great interest among Parsons' neighbors who, in turn, spread the news throughout the city; the home of the parish-clerk became a gathering place for people of every rank.

Horace Walpole, that famous litterateur, in a letter to George Montague, February 2, 1762, gave a vivid account of his visit to the ghost:

"I could send you volumes on the ghost, and I believe if I were to stay a little, I might send its life, dedicated to my Lord Dartmouth, by the Ordinary of Newgate, its two great patrons. A drunken parish clerk set it on foot out of revenge, the Methodists have adopted it, and the whole town of London thinks of nothing else. Elizabeth Canning and the Rabbit-woman were modest impostors in comparison to this, which goes on without saving the least appearances. The Archbishop, who would not suffer the 'Minor' to be acted in ridicule of the Methodists, permits this farce to be played every night, and I shall not be surprised if they perform in the great hall at Lambeth. I want to hear it, for it is not an apparition but an audition. We set out from the Opera, changed our clothes at Northumberland-house, the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one hackney coach, and drove to the spot; it rained torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in; at last they discovered it was the Duke of York, and the company squeezed themselves into one another's pockets to make room for us. The house, which is borrowed, and to which the ghost has adjourned, is wretchedly small and miserable; when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people, with no light but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench. At the top of the room are ropes to dry clothes. I asked if we were to have rope-dancing between