If I have enabled my readers to estimate aright the vital importance attached by the people of the several States in the formation of the Constitution to the recognition of the rights and the reserved sovereignty of the States, they will not be surprised to learn that when Thomas Jefferson established the Democratic party upon this recognition as its fundamental principle he secured for the Democratic party such a profound and permanent hold upon the confidence and the affections of the American people as can never be shaken while the Union remains what it was meant to be. For forty years after his first Presidency, no combinations succeeded in wresting from the Democrats the control of the executive authority. The only apparent exception to this statement confirms it. In the Presidential election of 1824, the electoral ticket of General Jackson, the leading Democratic candidate, received a considerable majority of the votes of the people; but as there were four candidates in the field, and General Jackson did not secure a majority of the votes of all the electoral colleges, the choice of a President went, under the Constitution, into the lower House of Congress, in which the members vote for a President not individually as representing the people, but by delegations as representing the sovereign States. John Quincy Adams secured a majority of the delegations; but such was the popular indignation that in the next House of Representatives President Adams found himself confronted by an overwhelming opposition; and at the end of his term of office General Jackson was made President by a majority of more than two to one against him. Jackson was twice elected, and transmitted his power to his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of New York, in the election of 1836. Between the years 1840 and 1860 the predominance of the Democratic party was but twice disturbed. In 1840 the Democratic President Van Buren, being a candidate for re-election, was defeated after a very severe struggle by General Harrison, the candidate of a conglomerate party which, for lack of a better, had taken the name of the “Whig” party, and which represented in a general way the Anti-Democratic classes of the country, and more particularly the banking interests and the Protectionists, of whom more hereafter. The real and brilliant leader of this party, Henry Clay of Kentucky, had been deprived of the presidential nomination through the machinations of a nominating device unknown to the Constitution, called a “Presidential Convention;” and though the Whig candidate secured a great majority in the electoral colleges, thanks to the skill with which his managers played upon the financial distress of the country caused by a great business panic in 1837, yet when he unexpectedly died at the end of a single short month after his inauguration, the Vice-President elected with him and who succeeded him, Mr. Tyler of Virginia, originally a Democrat, was found to be opposed to the rechartering of a United States Bank; and a bill passed by both Houses for that purpose, which had been indeed the main purpose of the leading Whigs in promoting the election of Harrison and Tyler, was twice vetoed by him. This was the first lesson given to the American people of the potential importance of the Vice-Presidency in case of the death or disability of the President. Curiously enough, the same lesson, which has been repeated several times since, has, in every instance, with one exception, followed upon the election of a President by Anti-Democratic votes.