The Reign of Andrew Jackson | Page 5

justice; he was diligent and conscientious; and, as one writer has remarked, bad grammar, incorrect pronunciation, and violent denunciation did not shock the judges of that day or divert the mind of juries from the truth. Traveling almost constantly over the wretched roads and through the dark forests, dodging Indians, swimming his horse across torrential streams, sleeping alone in the woods with hand on rifle, threatened by desperate wrongdoers, Andrew Jackson became the best-known figure in all western Tennessee and won at this time a great measure of that public confidence which later became his chief political asset.
Meanwhile the rapid growth of population south of the Ohio River made necessary new arrangements for purposes of government. In 1790 the region between the Ohio and the present States of Alabama and Mississippi, having been turned over to the Nation by its earlier possessors, was erected into the "Southwest Territory," and in 1791 the northern half became the State of Kentucky. In 1793 the remainder of the Territory set up a Legislature, and three years later delegates from the eleven counties met at Knoxville to draw up a new frame of government with a view to admission to statehood. Jackson was a member of this convention, and tradition has it that it was he who brought about the selection of the name Tennessee, an Indian term meaning "The Great Crooked River," as against Franklin, Washington, and other proposed designations for the new State. At all events, upon the admission of the State in 1796, he was chosen as its sole representative in the lower branch of Congress.
In the late autumn of that year the young lawmaker set out for the national capital at Philadelphia, and there he arrived, after a journey of almost eight hundred miles on horseback, just as the triumphs of the Democrats in the recent presidential election were being duly celebrated. He had not been chosen as a party man, but it is altogether probable that his own sympathies and those of most of his constituents lay with the Jeffersonians; and his appearance on the floor of Congress was an omen of the fast-rising tide of western democracy which should never find its ultimate goal until this rough but honest Tennesseean should himself be borne into the presidential chair.
Jackson's career in Congress was brief and uneventful. After a year of service in the House of Representatives he was appointed to fill the unexpired term of William Blount in the Senate. But this post he resigned in 1798 in order to devote his energies to his private affairs. While at Philadelphia he made the acquaintance not only of John Adams, Jefferson, Randolph, Gallatin, and Burr, but of his future Secretary of State, Edward Livingston, and of some other persons who were destined to be closely connected with his later career. But Jackson was not fitted for a legislative body either by training or by temperament. He is recorded as speaking in the House only twice and in the Senate not at all, and he seems to have made no considerable impression upon his colleagues. Gallatin later described him as "a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face, and a queue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment those of a rough backwoodsman." And Jefferson is represented as saying of Jackson to Webster at Monticello in 1824: "His passions are terrible. When I was president of the Senate he was Senator, and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage."
Return to Tennessee meant, however, only a transfer from one branch of the public service to another, for the ex-Senator was promptly appointed to a judgeship of the state supreme court at a salary of six hundred dollars a year. The position he found not uncongenial and he retained it for six years. Now, as earlier, Jackson's ignorance of law was somewhat compensated by his common sense, courage, and impartiality; and while only one of his decisions of this period is extant, Parton reports that the tradition of fifty years ago represented them as short, untechnical, unlearned, sometimes ungrammatical, but generally right. The daily life of Jackson as a frontier judge was hardly less active and exciting than it had been when he was a prosecuting attorney. There were long and arduous horseback journeys "on circuit"; ill-tempered persons often threatened, and sometimes attempted, to deal roughly with the author of an unfavorable decision; occasionally it was necessary to lay aside his dignity long enough to lend a hand in capturing or controlling a desperate character. For example, on arriving once in a settlement Jackson found that a powerful blacksmith had committed a