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to live in open sin with him and his wife. The deeply devout Quakers, horrified by this immorality, abandoned Adams and voted en masse for Jackson . And when the rumor went on to say that Adams brought the French girl home with him to America but abandoned the German girl, he lost the votes of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
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    Andrew Jackson was our first national hero since Washington and the object of much public adulation. When a little boy in rural Maryland learned that the General was passing through a nearby town he asked his parents to take him there. When they refused, he ran away from home. The little boy returned a few days later, beaming with joy and grinning from ear to ear. He parents were furious, but the infectiousness of his enthusiasm soon won them over and his father asked, "Did you see General Jackson?"
    Practically bursting with pride, the little boy said, "General Jackson spoke to me!"
    His parents were in awe. "What did he say to you?"
    The boy took a deep breath and then replied, "He told me to get the hell out of the way!"
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    Jackson was the type of man who was either a fast friend or an implacable enemy. If his honor or the honor of his wife were impugned, he responded with a challenge to a duel. In 1806 a man named Charles Dickinson not only insulted Rachel Jackson; he also owed Jackson a debt from a horse race, which he refused to pay. Jackson , of course, challenged Dickinson to a duel.
    The two men and their seconds met and the duel proceeded. The combatants stood back to back, walked apart forty paces, and turned. Jackson allowed Dickinson to take his shot first. Jackson was seen to flinch, but did not fall. He then took careful aim and shot Dickinson to death. Jackson then collapsed.
    His second rushed over to him and tore open his coat to find that Jackson had been shot in the chest. "Sir!" his friend exclaimed, "How could you stand and aim and fire with a bullet so near your heart?"
    Jackson replied, "I would have lived long enough to kill him if he had put a bullet in my brain."
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    The practice of kissing babies during campaigns is something of a cliché, but it has an historical point of origin. During the 1828 campaign General Jackson and his good friend John Eaton were greeted by a crowd of well-wishers, one of whom was a young woman with a baby in her arms. Jackson took the child, lifted it up, and cried out, "This is a sterling example of American youth." He passed the baby to his friend, said, "Kiss it, Eaton," and walked on.
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    Abraham Lincoln's face and form have become so iconic that we often lose sight of the fact that he was, well, rather ugly. Once, when riding on horseback along a town road, he chanced to pass a young woman in a buggy. She stopped to look at him and he tipped his hat politely. "Sir," she said, "I do believe that you are the ugliest man I have ever seen."
    Startled, Lincoln stammered, "Well, I... I don't know what I can do about that."
    "You could have stayed home," she observed.
    But he had a sense of humor about himself. When during a debate his opponent accused him of being two-faced, Lincoln asked, "Oh, come now. If I had two faces, would I be using this one?"
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    Lincoln was the kind of man who would occasionally answer a serious question with an anecdote or a quip. When the Civil War began a newspaper editor dispatched a reporter to Washington with instructions to interview as many members of the new administration as possible to pose the following question: was this Civil War inevitable? He received many thoughtful and complex answers; from Lincoln he received the following joke.
    "Well," Lincoln said, "that question reminds me of a story I heard tell about a country boy name of Jim Bob. Jim Bob had a powerful hankering to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. So he went down to the depot to talk to the depot master, who told him, 'Okay, Jim Bob, I'm agonna ask you some questions, and your answers'll tell me if you got the makings of a