his greatest distinction.  Lincoln’s magnanimity is the final proof of the completeness of his self-discipline.  The quality of being magnanimous is both the consummate virtue and the one which is least natural.  It was certainly far from being natural among Lincoln’s own people.  Americans of his time were generally of the opinion that it was dishonorable to overlook a personal injury.  They considered it weak and unmanly not to quarrel with another man a little harder than he quarreled with you.  The pioneer was good-natured and kindly; but he was aggressive, quick-tempered, unreasonable, and utterly devoid of personal discipline.  A slight or an insult to his personality became in his eyes a moral wrong which must be cherished and avenged, and which relieved him of any obligation to be just or kind to his enemy.  Many conspicuous illustrations of this quarrelsome spirit are to be found in the political life of the Middle Period, which, indeed, cannot be understood without constantly falling back upon the influence of lively personal resentments.  Every prominent politician cordially disliked or hated a certain number of his political adversaries and associates; and his public actions were often dictated by a purpose either to injure these men or to get ahead of them.  After the retirement of Jackson these enmities and resentments came to have a smaller influence; but a man’s right and duty to quarrel with anybody who, in his opinion, had done him an injury was unchallenged, and was generally considered to be the necessary accompaniment of American democratic virility.

As I have intimated above, Andrew Jackson was the most conspicuous example of this quarrelsome spirit, and for this reason he is wholly inferior to Lincoln as a type of democratic manhood.  Jackson had many admirable qualities, and on the whole he served his country well.  He also was a “Man of the People” who understood and represented the mass of his fellow-countrymen, and who played the part, according to his lights, of a courageous and independent political leader.  He also loved and defended the Union.  But with all his excellence he should never be held up as a model to American youth.  The world was divided into his personal friends and followers and his personal enemies, and he was as eager to do the latter an injury as he was to do the former a service.  His quarrels were not petty, because Jackson was, on the whole, a big rather than a little man, but they were fierce and they were for the most part irreconcilable.  They bulk so large in his life that they cannot be overlooked.  They stamp him a type of the vindictive man without personal discipline, just as Lincoln’s behavior towards Stanton, Chase, and others stamps him a type of the man who has achieved magnanimity.  He is the kind of national hero the admiring imitation of whom can do nothing but good.