The way had been prepared for this combination by the Republican acceptance of the Federal organization, after that party had assumed power; but the Western Democrats took this alliance much more innocently than the older Republican leaders.

They insisted, as we have seen, on a declaration of war against Great Britain; and humiliating as were the results of that war, this vigorous assertion of the national point of view, both exposed in clear relief the sectional disloyalty of the Federalists of New England and resulted later in an attempted revival of a national constructive policy.

It is true that the regeneration of the Hamiltonian spirit belongs rather to the history of the Whigs than to the history of the Democrats.

It is true, also, that the attempted revival at once brought out the inadequacy of the pioneer's conceptions both of the national and the democratic ideas.
Nevertheless, it was their assertion of the national interest against a foreign enemy which provoked its renewed vitality in relation to our domestic affairs.

Whatever the alliance between nationality and democracy, represented by the pioneers, lacked in fruitful understanding of the correlative ideas, at least it was solid alliance.