He had shown himself to be desirous of recognition and influence; but ambition had not been the compelling motive in his life.

In most respects his ideas, interests, and standards were precisely the same as those of his associates.

He accepted with them the fabric of traditional American political thought and the ordinary standards of contemporary political morality.

He had none of the moral strenuousness of the reformer, none of the exclusiveness of a man, whose purposes and ideas were consciously perched higher than those of his neighbors.

Probably the majority of his more successful associates classed him as a good and able man who was somewhat lacking in ambition and had too much of a disposition to loaf.
He was most at home, not in his own house, but in the corner grocery store, where he could sit with his feet on the stove swapping stories with his friends; and if an English traveler of 1850 had happened in on the group, he would most assuredly have discovered another instance of the distressing vulgarity to which the absence of an hereditary aristocracy and an established church condemned the American democracy.
Thus no man could apparently have been more the average product of his day and generation.