On the old record books of the minutes of the proceedings of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions kept at Jonesboro will be found the following entry: “State of North Carolina Washington County, Monday the Twelfth day of May Anno Domini One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Eight. Andrew Jackson Esq. came into Court and Produced a license as an Attorney With A Certificate sufficiently Attested of his Taking the Oaths Necessary to said office and Was admitted to Practiss as an Attorney in this County Court.” The entry immediately preceding recites that “Archibald Roane, David Allison, and Joseph Hamilton Esquires Produced sufficient Licenses to Practiss as Attorneys and were admitted,” etc.; and the entry immediately following recites that “John McNairey Produced a license as an Attorney,” etc., and “was admitted to Practiss as an attorney,” etc.
Thus this old record shows the admission to the bar, on the same day, in the one-story log court-house, twenty-four feet square, at Jonesboro, of five young men.
Jackson’s promotion from one office to another, until he reached the highest and most exalted office on earth, the Presidency of the United States, is known to all; but that “Twelfth day of May Anno Domini One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Eight” must have been a lucky day, or there must have been good material in those young men—for Andrew Jackson was not the only one of them who attained eminence. Jackson was first United States attorney for the “District of Mero,” but Roane held the same office at the same time in the Hamilton District, while McNairy presided over both of them as federal judge for “the territory of the United States of America south of the river Ohio.” Jackson met both McNairy and Roane as fellow delegates in the constitutional convention for Tennessee, in 1796. Jackson was afterward a judge of the Superior Court of Law and Equity, but so were both McNairy and Roane—and this, too, before Jackson reached the bench, they having been elected at the first session of the first general assembly of Tennessee, in April, 1796, before the state had been formally admitted into the Union by act of Congress. Their decisions, however, were never called into question on that ground.
In 1797, McNairy was appointed a district judge of the Federal Court in Tennessee, which position he held continuously until his death in 1831 or 1832, leaving his reputation as a wise and just judge and an upright man as a heritage to Tennesseans.
Roane resigned his judgeship in June, 1801, and was elected Governor of Tennessee in the following August. On retiring from the office of Governor, after having served two years, he remained in private life until 1811, when he was appointed circuit judge. Thereafter—in October, 1815—he was again appointed to the Superior Court bench, where he remained until April or May, 1818, and then retired from public service, honored and esteemed.
David Allison was commissioned “Master of the Rolls and Clerk in Equity of the Superior Court of Law and Equity” for Washington District at Jonesboro, by Judges Samuel Spencer and David Campbell, in August, 1788. He held this office for about two years, resigning in 1790, when he went to the settlement on the Cumberland—now Nashville—and engaged, I believe, in the mercantile business.
Joseph Hamilton disappears entirely from the court records and proceedings at Jonesboro, and I have been able only to trace him elsewhere, as Clerk of the County Court of Caswell county, State of Franklin, 1785, and when he was appointed by the territorial Governor and Council to aid in running and marking the lines of Knox and Jefferson counties, when they were established in 1792, and where he was appointed one of the Trustees of Greeneville College in 1794.
It was while Roane was Governor, in 1802, that the memorable contest between John Sevier and Andrew Jackson, for the position of Major General of militia in Tennessee, occurred. It was no empty and meaningless honor to hold this position then in the state—as subsequent events demonstrated. Under the terms of the constitution, the Major General was elected by the field officers of the militia. When the votes which had been cast were counted, there was found to be a tie between Jackson and Sevier. The Governor, by virtue of his office, was commander-in-chief of the militia. He was therefore a field officer, and as such was entitled to cast, and did cast, the deciding vote between these two great commanders. Governor Roane gave his vote for Jackson, and Jackson thus became Major General of militia in Tennessee, which led him up to the victory he gained over the British at New Orleans, and this victory eventually made him President of the United States. If Roane had voted for Sevier?—I am a Presbyterian.
Roane was a candidate for re-election to the office of Governor, in August, 1803. John Sevier was a candidate against him, and defeated him, notwithstanding the fact that Roane had the earnest and active support of Jackson. Jackson and Roane combined could not beat Sevier before the people, although the latter had been three times Governor theretofore. Roane, as before stated, remained in private life until 1811. Sevier was twice elected Governor after having defeated Roane, and remained in public service almost continuously until his death in September, 1815. To give in detail the various offices with which John Sevier was honored, every one of which he honored in turn, would be foreign to the subject. He filled every office known to the statutes—and some which were unknown—except two: he was never a Senator in Congress nor a judge of any of the Superior Courts. (He was not a lawyer.) Nothing that could be said on the subject would add to this evidence of the confidence the people had in him, and of their faith in and affection for the man.
Jackson had attained to the age of twenty-one years on the 15th of March preceding the entry above quoted, admitting him to the bar in Washington county. He may have been formally admitted at Salisbury or Morganton, North Carolina, but he did not in fact open an office or enter upon the practice of law at either place. The order admitting him to the bar at Jonesboro, therefore, may be accepted and regarded as the opening entry in the business life and the professional and political career of this, one of the greatest of all Americans.