It is four o'clock in the afternoon when the Clay-guided House counts Statesman Adams into a Presidency. Five hours afterward the General meets Statesman Adams in the East Room, where both are in attendance upon the last reception of outgoing President Munroe. The contrast between them tells in the General's favor. There is no gloom of disappointment on his brow, no cloud of defeat in his hawkish blue eyes. The General has a lady on his arm. He greets Statesman Adams gracefully and extends his hand:
“How is Mr. Adams?” cries he. “I give you my left hand, sir, since my right is devoted to the fair.”
Statesman Adams is a diplomat, and used to courts and salons. The General is of the wilderness and its battlefields. And yet the General shines out the more polished of the two. Statesman Adams takes the extended hand; but he does it awkwardly, backwardly, and with a wooden manner, as though his deportment is seized of some sudden, bashful stiffness of the joints. At last he manages to say:
WIZARD LEWIS boldly re-begins his work of White House capturing. He becomes busy to the elbows in the General's destinies before Statesman Adams is inaugurated. When the latter names Statesman Clay to be his Secretary of State, Wizard Lewis lays bare the deal which thus exalts the Kentuckian. He raises the cry of “Bargain and Corruption!” and the public takes it up. Statesman Adams and Statesman Clay are pilloried as conspirators who have wronged the General of a Presidency, and the State portfolio in the hands of Statesman Clay is pointed to as proof. The General writes the blooming Rachel, just now at home by the Cumberland:
“The Judas of the West has closed the contract and received the thirty pieces of silver.” Statesman Clay defends himself badly. He declares that he objects to the General's White House ambitions only because he is a “Military Chieftain.” He speaks as though the world knows that a “Military Chieftain” will make a perilous Chief Magistrate. The world knows nothing of the sort; the cry of “Bargain and Corruption” gains head.
In retort to that arraignment of being a “Military Chieftain”--made as if the phrase be merely another name for “buccaneer”--the General writes the old friendly fox, Colonel Burr: