Webster portrait (opposite p. 7 in extra-illustrated Life)

An image of Daniel Webster, a contemporary and later rival of Jackson, this portrait originally came, like many other portraits in this extra-illustrated Life, from the 1834 book The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, [catalog record] compiled by artists James Herring and James B. Longacre. This early chapter of the Jackson biography is still concerned with his early life, before his entry into national politics. Webster only appears at this point in the book because its author discusses Jackson’s education and legal practice in Tennessee: Snelling contemptuously contrasts the rural backwater where Jackson first practiced law in the late 1780s with the “more advanced state of society” in Webster’s New England, claiming that in a place like eighteenth-century Tennessee, “the questions argued in the courts are generally of the most simple kind, and upon the plainest points of law”.

Webster portrait (opposite p. 7 in extra-illustrated Life)

From extra-illustrated copy of A Brief and Impartial History of the Life and Actions of Andrew Jackson [catalog record]