They brought with them their own homegrown proclivity toward clubbiness and the hauteur instilled in them by their lives back home as masters of their personal slave empires. Even the White House, the hub of Washington social life, was beneath them, occupied as it was by Jackson, the benighted Democrat who forcefully crushed Carolina’s nullification movement. They made a point of declining invitations to the elaborate parties Jackson threw on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. This unwillingness to engage with colleagues from other states—and their own state’s reputation as a petulant, possibly
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