ANDREW JACKSON.
George Bancroft said, "No man in private life so possessed the hearts of all around him; no public man of the country ever returned to private life with such an abiding mastery over the affections of the people.... He was as sincere a man as ever lived. He was wholly, always, and altogether sincere and true. Up to the last he dared do anything that it was right to do. He united personal courage and moral courage beyond any man of whom history keeps the record.... Jackson never was vanquished. He was always fortunate. He conquered the wilderness; he conquered the savage; he conquered the veterans of the battle-field of Europe; he conquered everywhere in statesmanship; and when death came to get the mastery over him, he turned that last enemy aside as tranquilly as he had done the feeblest of his adversaries, and passed from earth in the triumphant consciousness of immortality."
Thus wrote Bancroft of the man who rose from poverty and sorrow to receive the highest gift which the American nation can bestow. The gift did not come through chance; it came because the man was worthy of it, and had earned the love and honor of the people.
In 1765, among many other emigrants, a man, with his wife and two sons, came to the new world from the north of Ireland. They were linen-weavers, poor, but industrious, and members of the Presbyterian Church. They settled at Waxhaw, North Carolina, not far from the South Carolina boundary, and the husband began to build a log house for his dear ones. This man was the father of Andrew Jackson.
Scarcely had the log house been built, and a single crop raised, before the wife was left a widow and the children fatherless. There was a quiet funeral, a half-dozen friends standing around an open grave, and then the little house passed into other hands, and Mrs. Jackson went to live at the home of her brother-in-law.
Not long after the funeral, a third son was born, March 15, 1767, whom the stricken mother named Andrew Jackson, after his father. He was welcomed in tears, and naturally became the idol of her young heart. Three weeks later, she moved to the house of another brother-in-law to assist in his family. She was not afraid to work, and she bent herself to the hard labor of pioneer life. There was no sorrow in the labor, for was she not doing it for her sons, and a noble woman knows no hardship in her self-sacrifice for love.
Her ambition seems to have centred in the slight, light-haired, blue-eyed Andrew, who, she hoped, one day might become a Presbyterian minister. How he was to obtain a college education, perhaps, she did not discern, but she trusted, and trust is a divine thing.