[1] The following letter addressed to Gen. Dan Smith is preserved in Nashville:
“October 29th, 1795.
“Sir: Captain John Hays and myself wish to have our land divided; for which purpose to-morrow is appointed, wish to get the favor of you to do the business, as we wish it done accurate; therefore hope you will do us the favor to come to my house this evening, so that we may take an early start to-morrow. Will thank you to bring with you your compass and chain. If you cannot come will thank you to favor me with the loan of your compass and chain by the bearer. I am, sir with the highest esteem, your most obedient servant,
[Signed] “Andrew Jackson.”
At the sale of the first lots in Florence in July, 1818, James Madison (who but a few years before had been elected President of the young Republic, and Andrew Jackson, who in a few years more was destined to be another of her Presidents) both bought lots in the new town, then, as now, a goodly, fair site in the bend where the Tennessee, hugging the Southern hills as if to escape the mouth of the foaming, passionate, tumultuous shoals, shrinks away, and, like a beautiful woman when she throws off her mantle in the ball room, exposes shoulders fair to see.
They were fair enough in the wilderness to stop Jackson and Madison. Jackson must have seen the beautiful site for a city on this most beautiful and lordly river often. On his first taste of Indian fighting he crossed it somewhere near Florence, when pioneer Tennesseans struck the Indian marauders who lived at the great Coldwater spring at the present site of Tuscumbia, a few miles beyond. Later his troops crossed it down the old military road he cut out from Nashville to Pensacola, when they marched to New Orleans, to glory or to death. The gap in the mountainous hills near where the graceful bridge of the Louisville & Nashville crosses the river is still pointed out as the spot where the heroes of New Orleans pontooned across from the mouth of the creek. Methinks the old hero never forgot this spot—the great, splendid river, wooded, hill-crowned, plain-girdled and thunder-foamed with the spray from the long-leaping, shining shoals.
Rifle pits on hill at Florence used by Confederate soldiers.
He was young when he first saw it. He had made no name and no history. He was only a common, ordinary, hot-blooded, dare-devil, cussin’, fighting Irish boy, lank of form, peaked of face and forehead, with piercing blue eyes, a thin, lofty, religious, idealized, hatchety head, bequeued with bristling, sandy-red hair.