When he reached New Orleans in 1814 to take command of the army, Governor Claiborne gave him a dinner; and after he had gone Mrs.Claiborne, who knew European courts and society better than any other American woman, said to her husband: "Call that man a backwoodsman?
He is the finest gentleman I ever met!" There is another witness--Mr.Buchanan, afterward President--who tells how he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old Hickory was President; how he went up to the general's private apartment, where he found him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking his pipe; how, when he intimated that the President might before coming down slick himself a bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke: "Buchanan, I once knew a man in Virginia who made himself independently rich by minding his own business"; how, when he did come down, he was _en regle_; and finally how, after a half hour of delightful talk, the English lady as they regained the street broke forth with enthusiasm, using almost the selfsame words of Mrs.Claiborne: "He is the finest gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my life." VI The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the Mexican soldiers--seems but yesterday.

We were in Nashville, where the camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal state.

I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on his way to Washington, General Taylor grasping his old comrade, my grandfather, by the hand, called him "Billy," and paternally stroked my curls.
Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in the White House.

He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore.

It is common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an ignoramus.
I don't think this.