OLD HICKORY
Peace found young Andrew bereft of mother, brothers and worldly inheritance, but with a vigorous constitution, a chivalrous sense of moral duty and a deep, abiding love for his country, he set out resolutely upon an unexampled career, the chief characteristic of which in earlier years was reckless daring, in which he was unconsciously laying the foundations for that intrepid adherence to right principle that later set him apart and above his fellows. Of uncommon mental endowment, he easily acquired such education as was then obtainable and adopted the profession of law, and when but twenty-one years of age he fell in with the adventurous spirit of the times on the frontier and made his way with the pioneers into the Southwest Territory. After lingering in the Watauga settlements a time, he followed the trail still farther into the wilderness until he reached the beautiful basin of the Cumberland, where he took up his final abode.
There, from the first, he took his place easily and naturally as a leader of men and began to work out that great destiny which will link his name indissolubly with liberty and free government as long as men love to be free, the symbol of the soundest and strongest fundamental principle in government ever conceived by man.
Measured by the moral standards now obtaining, many of his acts and habits in those earlier years cannot be justified, although there is little to indicate that they were held to be reprehensible then. His chief characteristic was towering and intolerant mastery of men, his greatest foible was his love for a race-horse, and he left nothing further to be done in following both bents, and yet he was actuated in everything by the highest conception of honor and principle, and imparted dignity and the virtue of his own indomitable character to every transaction in which he engaged.
The annals of men do not afford, and fiction has never conceived, an instance of more sublime devotion to womanhood than Andrew Jackson held for his wife. He loved her with an intensity of tenderness that was the exact antithesis of that fierce and stormy love of adventure and aptitude for arms that possessed him; and if nothing else were known of him but this, it would enshrine his name forever. She could not have been less than a charming, loving woman to have deserved the devotion of such a man and held it to the end, and she sleeps now by his side under a slab inscribed with a tribute by his hand that for entreating tenderness of sweet affection is scarcely paralleled:
“Here lie the remains of Mrs. Rachel Jackson, wife of President Jackson, who died the 22d of December, 1828, aged 61. Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, her heart kind; she delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods; to the poor she was a benefactor, to the wretched a comforter, to the prosperous an ornament; her piety went hand in hand with her benevolence, and she thanked her Creator for being permitted to do good. A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound, but could not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transport her to the bosom of her God.”
Jackson’s character as a warrior and a statesman are so conspicuous as to dwarf by comparison his record as a lawyer. It is said that he filed seventy lawsuits for clients in the first month of his practice, and that out of one hundred and ninety-two cases before the court in 1790 he was counsel in forty-two. Three years later his cases numbered seventy-two out of one hundred and fifty-five, and the next year he increased this to two hundred and twenty-eight out of three hundred and ninety-seven. It was no inconspicuous lawyer who could make such record as this. But for his other resplendent traits, his reputation as a jurist might rest more securely, but it doubtless suffered much by his own indisposition to build his fame upon it.
He was only eight years in Tennessee before being made Major-General of militia, which in those times meant active service in the field. His career as a soldier needs scant recapitulation here to establish the statement that it was characterized by a most unselfish patriotism. He hesitated at nothing when his country’s interests were in jeopardy, creating opportunities and anticipating the power to meet them, daring even to invade a friendly territory, to disobey superior orders, to take fate and destiny in his own hands at any peril to himself.
It was this same unchanging, unconquerable spirit of invincible daring that characterized his administration of the government and nerved him to defy and conquer the money power that was then dominating the country through the United States Bank and gave him power to meet and quell the turbulent and dangerous doctrine of the right of a state to nullify a proper act of Congress.
The most conspicuous service rendered to mankind by Andrew Jackson was the creation and enforcement of the political cult that is expressed in his name. “Andy Jackson Democracy” has no mere partisan significance, but it denotes a principle and power in popular government that is to save to America forever the right of the people to rule themselves—the invincible strength of a central government based upon the supreme power of the separate states acting in harmony.