He was to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard University and nothing under heaven was going to prevent his appearance. John Quincy Adams, an overseer of the university, was appalled. As “an affectionate child of our Alma Mater,” he wrote, he could not witness “her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”26 But Jackson was no illiterate frontiersman, much less a barbarian, even though his grammar and spelling lacked “refinement.” He combined grace of manner with
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