On mis-reading the tea leaves...........

 This garbled argument aligned with Jackson's sense of persecution and long-standing unwillingness to respect the sincerity and moral seriousness of his opponents.  He suspected the abolitionists of using slavery as a stalking horse, rather, to attack his administration.  In Jackson's world of finely spun conspiracies, the rich and influential feared democracy and threw whatever they could—internal improvements, the Bank, and now abolitionism—to knock him down.  He took seriously only his own ethical concerns, and the cares of others were variously dismissed as mere opportunism.

-David S. Brown, The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson