Beacon Lights of History, Volume 12 | Page 3

fatal to all dignity of character; but there must be something
about him which calls out the respect and admiration of those with
whom he is surrounded, so as to give him a start, and open a way for
success in the business or enterprise where his genius lies.
Such a man was Andrew Jackson. Whether as a youth, or as a man
pursuing his career of village lawyer in the backwoods of a frontier
settlement, he was about the last person of whom one would predict
that he should arise to a great position and unbounded national
popularity. His birth was plebeian and obscure. His father, of
Scotch-Irish descent, lived in a miserable hamlet in North Carolina,
near the South Carolina line, without owning a single acre of land,--one
of the poorest of the poor whites. The boy Andrew, born shortly after
his father's death in 1767, was reared in poverty and almost without
education, learning at school only to "read, write, and cipher;" nor did
he have any marked desire for knowledge, and never could spell
correctly. At the age of thirteen he was driven from his native village
by its devastation at the hands of the English soldiers, during the
Revolutionary War. His mother, a worthy and most self-reliant woman,
was an ardent patriot, and all her boys--Hugh, Robert, and
Andrew--enlisted in the local home-guard. The elder two died, Hugh of
exposure and Robert of prison small-pox, while Andrew, who had also
been captured and sick of the disease, survived this early training in the

scenes of war for further usefulness. The mother made her way on foot
to Charleston, S.C., to nurse the sick patriots in the prison-ships, and
there died of the prison fever, in 1781. The physical endurance and
force of character of this mother constituted evidently the chief legacy
that Andrew inherited, and it served him well through a long and
arduous life.
At fifteen the boy was "a homeless orphan, a sick and sorrowful
orphan," working for a saddler in Charleston a few hours of the day, as
his health would permit. With returning strength he got possession of a
horse; but his army associates had led him into evil ways, and he
became indebted to his landlord for board. This he managed to pay
only by staking his horse in a game of dice against $200, which he
fortunately won; and this squared him with the world and enabled him
to start afresh, on a better way.
Poor and obscure as he was, and imperfectly educated, he aspired to be
a lawyer; and at eighteen years of age he became a law-student in the
office of Mr. Spruce McCay in Salisbury, North Carolina. Two years
later, in 1787, he was admitted to the bar. Not making much headway
in Salisbury, he wandered to that part of the State which is now
Tennessee, then an almost unbroken wilderness, exposed to Indian
massacres and depredations; and finally he located himself at Nashville,
where there was a small settlement,--chiefly of adventurers, who led
lives of license and idleness.
It seems that Jackson, who was appointed district-attorney, had a
considerable practice in his profession of a rough sort, in that frontier
region where the slightest legal knowledge was sufficient for success.
He was in no sense a student, like Jefferson and Madison in the early
part of their careers in Virginia as village lawyers, although he was
engaged in as many cases, and had perhaps as large an income as they.
But what was he doing all this while, when he was not in his log-office
and in the log-court-room, sixteen feet square? Was he pondering the
principles or precedents of law, and storing his mind with the
knowledge gained from books? Not at all. He was attending horse-races
and cock-fightings and all the sports which marked the Southern people

one hundred years ago; and his associates were not the most cultivated
and wealthy of them either, but ignorant, rough, drinking, swearing,
gambling, fighting rowdies, whose society was repulsive to people of
taste, intelligence, and virtue.
The young lawyer became a favorite with these men, and with their
wives and sisters and daughters. He could ride a horse better than any
of his neighbors; he entered into their quarrels with zeal and devotion;
he was bold, rash, and adventurous, ever ready to hunt a hostile Indian,
or fight a duel, or defend an innocent man who had suffered injury and
injustice. He showed himself capable of the warmest and most devoted
friendship as well as the bitterest and most unrelenting hatred. He was
quick to join a dangerous enterprise, and ever showing ability to lead
it,--the first on the spot to put out a fire; the first to expose himself in a
common danger; commanding respect for