Mr. Middleton took this advice of his venerable father greatly to heart. "Up with Jackson, and down with Party!" said he, after a long rumination; "good, excellent--nothing can be better!" And several times that night, before he went to bed, he audibly uttered the same words, as he walked backward and forward across the room.
From this time Judge Flam wrote many letters to his friends, disclosing the views he had expressed to Middleton; and by degrees the matter ripened and ripened, until things were so contrived as to bring about what Judge Flam used to smile and say, was "a spontaneous, unpremeditated burst of popular feeling," in the nomination of the General. And the Judge used to laugh outright, when the papers took strong ground in the General's favor, as the candidate who was brought out "without intrigue or party management." The Old Hero and Sage, we all know, was cheated out of his first election; which circumstance greatly embittered his early friends, who, from that time--Mr. Middleton among the rest--took a very decided stand for Reform, Retrenchment, Economy, and the Rights of the People.
The Judge did not live to witness this second effort which resulted so gloriously for the Democratic cause; but his son stuck close to the Old Hero, and was among his most ardent supporters to the last. When the General succeeded, his first care was to show his gratitude to that disinterested band of patriots who so freely surrendered their old principles and abandoned their old comrades in his behalf. _He_ brought _them_ into office, just to show that he was determined to carry out the doctrine of his letter; and _they_ were loudest in their praise of _him_ for the sake of the _old grudge_, of which Judge Flam spoke to his son, and to indemnify their long suffering in the cause of the country, in the course of which they had, for so many years, been strangers to power. So between these two persuasions, it is not to be wondered at that they should have become the principal friends and most confidential advisers of the General.
Having thus got upon an elevation, from whence they could look backward upon their past errors, and forward to their future hopes, a new light dawned upon every man of them; and thereupon they straightway became sick and sorry for having so long sinned against Democracy, and grew ashamed of that black cockade which George Washington wore in the Revolution; made open renunciation of their former pretended attachment to his principles; canonized Mr. Jefferson as a saint, whom they had formerly reviled as the chief of sinners; purged out their old Federal blood; took deep alterative draughts of detergent medicine; and, finally, like true patriots, came forth regenerated, thorough-bred whole-hog Democrats, sworn to follow the new Democratic principle through all its meanderings, traverses, dodgings, and duckings to the end. Indeed, Mr. Middleton Flam, our honorable representative, has more than once, in some of his later speeches before the people, contended, that although his father was attached to George Washington's school of politics, which, as he remarked, naturally arose out of the prejudices created by the revolutionary war--in which the old Judge had served as a soldier--yet, that he, Middleton, never was truly an admirer of that gentleman's theory of government or system of measures--but, on the contrary, held them in marked disesteem, and from his earliest youth had a strong inclination toward that freedom from restraint, which, in man and boy, is the best test of the new Democratic principle. In proof of this tendency of his youthful opinions, he mentioned, with most admirable effect, an exploit, in which, when not more than twelve years of age, he gallantly stood up at the head of a party of his school-fellows to bar out the tutor and take a holiday, on the ground of the indefeasible rights of man, with a view to attend a great political meeting of the friends of Jefferson, just previous to the second election of that Apostle of Democracy.