His predecessor in the
presidential chair was John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate and an
aristocrat. Jackson was illiterate, a man of the people. There was an
extension of the social democratic feeling.
All classes, the poor as well as the rich, spoke their minds more freely on
every subject. Even Jackson's messages relating to foreign nations were
sometimes not couched in very diplomatic terms. Every one felt that he was
as good as anybody else, and in the new settlements all mingled on terms of
equality. When Cooper came back to the United States in 1833, after an
absence of six years in Europe, he found that he had returned to a new
country, where "everybody was everywhere," and nobody was anywhere, and
where the chase for the dollar seemed to have grown more absorbing than
ever before.
Slavery had become one of the leading questions of the day. To keep the
balance between the North and the South, states were often admitted in
pairs, one free and one slave state. In 1845 there were in the Union
thirteen free and fourteen slave states. The decade between 1840 and 1850
witnessed the war with Mexico and the acquisition from her of our vast
southwestern territory,--Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New
Mexico, and some interior lands to the north of these.
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