MY

acquaintance with Andrew Jackson dates from the time when I read in my first history of the refusal of a spirited Carolina boy to black the boots of a British officer. That acquaintance has ripened to friendship through subsequent reading and association. During my college days at Vanderbilt it was my good fortune to see a number of times and to talk with the late Col. A. S. Colyar, of Nashville, at that time engaged in preparing his large two-volume life of Andrew Jackson. It has been my pleasure to know as friends several of the descendants of the Donelson family, to which Mrs. Jackson belonged, both in Memphis and Nashville. To one of these descendants as Secretary and as Regent of the Ladies' Hermitage Association, as much as to any other one person, is due the credit of preserving the home of Andrew Jackson; in company with her and other friends I have visited the Hermitage, walking through its halls and rooms, viewing its antique furniture, wandering over the surrounding fields, pulling violets in the garden where the old soldier and his wife lie buried.

To one who has eyes to see and ears to hear, such a contact with the natural scenes amid which a striking life developed is full of inspiration. That we may better understand the life and character of Andrew Jackson, we shall recall the principal events in his life, already more or less familiar to all of you. He was born nine years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence in a community of Irish immigrants in the Carolinas. From this From this same people there came two men who were afterwards to be among Jackson's

political opponents, John C. Calhoun and William Henry Crawford-men whose antagonism made the political history of the greater part of the second and third decades of the last century. tury. Andrew Jackson, Sr., was probably the poorest settler in the com⚫munity and was forced to take a claim far out in the wilderness; his struggle with this wilderness was soon over and he died within two years after he reached America, and a few weeks before Andrew's birth. Two of Andrew's brothers gave up their lives for their country in the last days of the Revolutionary War, and his mother died of a fever contracted while nursing American soldiers at Charletson. In one of her novels George Eliot speaks of the influence of one's childhood on one's after-life; there is no wonder that Andrew Jackson hated the English and loved his country, when all the members of his family but himself died as martyrs for the land they loved, three of the four in opposing the forces of England.

During the last half of the eighteenth century the intellectual activity of the young men in America, which had prepreviously been devoted to the study of theology, was directed to the law; as the country developed the complication of property rights and diversification of industry rendered some legal knowledge necessary. Jackson studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1788 and came to Tennessee in 1789 as public prosecutor for this frontier country. The whites were still engaged in conflict with the Indians, the difficulty of cultivating where forests abound and where abundance of game furnishes food rendering them idle, thriftless and akin to the

savages in habits and occupations. These pioneers were not always the heroes we make them in song and story and sometimes lowered themselves in their contact with the wild savage life of the wilderness. They were litigious; Court Day was and still is in some of the mountain towns of Tennessee and Kentucky a social gathering, an occasion for gossip, an opportunity for trading, a time for moulding public opinion by the stump speech and political oration. To be a prosecutor in such a community was to take one's life into one's own hands, especially if the breaker of the law had public sentiment on his side.

It required courage, determination and common sense; that Jackson proved himself equal to the task of introducing law and order is evidenced by a remark of Governor Blount, when certain wrongs were reported to him, "Just inform Mr. Jackson; he will be sure to do his duty, and the offenders will be punished." Appointed as judge, Jackson was equally fearless; on the way to hold court at Jonesboro in the fall of 1803 he was informed that a combination had been formed against him to mob him. At the time he was suffering from intermittent fever; weary from his long journey and burning with fever, he lay dowi upon a bed in the tavern on his arrival at Jonesboro. A little while after his coming a friend rushed to his room to tell him to lock the door, for a colonel and a whole crowd of men had assembled in front of the tavern for the purpose of tarring and feathering him. Instead of locking the door, he threw it wide open and sent this message to the colonel: "Give my compliments to the colonel and tell him my door is open to receive him and his regiment whenever they choose to wait upon me, and that I hope the colonel's chivalry will induce him to lead his men, not follow them."

From 1796 to 1798 he had represented Tennessee in Congress, but made very little impression; in fact, at the close of

the first decade of the nineteenth century, though well known in sis own state, he was not a national figure. Within ten years he was the dominant personality of his age. In 1801 he had been elected Major-General of the Tennessee militia over John Sevier by one vote. It is interesting to speculate on the consequences of that one vote; had it not been for that vote there would have been no Indian campaign; had there been no I$ndian campaign, there would have been no New Orleans; had there been no New Orleans, there would have been no election to the Presidency. In the popular mind, Jackson's military reputation rests on the victory at New Orleans; it is interesting to record that the Duke of Wellington once remarked, "If he had done nothing else, this Creek campaign would have made Jackson one of the great generals of the world."

Jackson's victory at New Orleans in 1815 was more than a combination of good luck, reckless audacity and the blundering of his enemies. Such a combination even cannot account for the defeat of Pakenham, with the single exception of Wellington the greatest General in the English army, supported by such veterans as Hannibal had at Cannae. It is true that Pakenham made the same mistake of every British officer who fought in America, from Braddock'down, of despising his enemy. "Who would have thought it?" muttered Braddock as he was dying, and the words might well have been Pakenham's. As a strategist, a tactician, a fighter, a disciplinarian and a leader of men, Jackson does not suffer in comparison with the most accomplished officers of his time. He had limited opportunities, small resources and his operations were comparatively insignificant. Carlyle says: "You may paint with a very large brush and not be a painter after all;" and the converse is true-you may paint with a small brush and be a master.

When Jackson went to Washington

yond any man of whom history keeps record. Not danger, not an army in battle array, not age, not the anguish of disease could impair in the least degree the vigor of his steadfast mind. The heroes of antiquity would have contemplated with awe the unmatched hardihood of his character; and Napoleon, had he possessed his disinterested will, could never have been vanquished."

After his retirement to the Hermitage, General Jackson took no active interest in national politics-an example that might have been followed with profit to himself by a political leader of our day. Having refused to unite with the Church because his political enemies might call it a political move, after his retirement the General fulfilled his promise to Mrs. Jackson and became a communicant. To the end of his life he was democratic in theory and practice. Two months before his death Commodore Elliott offered him as his final resting place the sarcophagus of Alexander Severus, recently brought to this country from Palestine. One paragraph of Jackson's answer contains his political philosophy and democratic creed: "I can not consent that my mortal body shall be laid in a repository prepared for an Emperor or King. My republican feelings and principles forbid it; the simplicity of our system of government forbids it. Every monument erected to perpetuate the memory of our heroes and statesmen ought to bear evidences of the economy and simplicity of our republican institutions and of the plainness of our republican citizens, who are the sovereigns of our glorious Union and whose virtue it is to perpetuate it. True virtue can not exist where pomp and parade are the governing passions. It can only dwell with the people the great laboring and producing classesthat form the bone and sinew of our Confederacy."

No man has been more criticised or

more bitterly assailed than Andrew Jackson. He has been criticised for impulsiveness and the criticism is just. He has been accused of murder in his execution of certain rebellious and mutinous soldiers and of two Indian

agents in Florida; as for myself, I can not justify some of those executions. He has been criticised for insubordination; twice did he defy the courts of the United States and twice did he disobey the orders of his superior, the Secretary of War - a disobedience which he should not have brooked for a moment. He has been called rude and

ignorant; unlike his predecessors, he did not have a college education; he was never able to spell correctly, and though Harvard University did confer on him the degree of LL. D., it seems more like a sycophantic compliment than a deserving honor, easily explicable when we remember that Harvard has the custom of conferring this degree on every man, deserving or undeserving, who is elected Governor of the State of Massachusetts. Doubtless

he failed to conform to certain rules of etiquette; there are some men who can so fail and still be more courteous and genteel than others who observe every requirement, because their courtesy is more than a veneer. True courtesy is not so much a training of tongue as a disposition of the heart. Sir Phillip Sidney was the pattern to all England of the perfect gentleman, and yet he was a soldier, who, on the field of Zutphen refused, though wounded, to quench his thirst until the poor, dying soldier at his side had first been satisfied. Such was the courtesy of Andrew Jackson. It has been stated that he did not write his state papers; there is no doubt that he was unduly influenced by certain rather unscrupulous men and that the final form of his state papers is due to other hands than his own; but the spirit and the thought are intensely Jacksonian; and these are of more importance than mere phraseol

ogy.

He has been accused of being actuated too much by personal hatred; he often wished that he could lay aside the robes of office and attack Henry Clay; after his retirement he sometimes doubted whether it would not have been better if he had executed Calhoun for high treason on account of his nullification views.

No man made more mistakes, no man had more faults; but he was fortunate in being placed in situations in which his very faults were sometimes virtues. When I think of the extravagance of the age in which we live, when we should be troubled, as Mr. Hill aptly puts it, not so much by the high cost of living as the cost of high living, when we are willing to sacrifice everything to maintain the standard we have set for ourselves, I wish a little of the simplicity of Jackson could be woven into the texture of our lives. When we

look about us and see political leaders with ears bent to the ground to catch the distant rumble of public opinion, rather than leading men in the paths of their convictions; when we see moral leaders hesitating because they despair of the finality of spiritual standards; when we see ourselves vacillating on questions of right and wrong, well would it be for us, if some of Jackson's conscientious determination could find. its way into our world.

In a country where there is a growing discord between special privileges and oppressed humanity, a little of Jackson's confidence in the people might help to bring harmony. In our time we may well pause and study the life of Andrew Jackson, who with all of his faults, stands as the exponent of the simple life, the incarnation of human will and the apotheosis of the spirit of true Democracy.

I

of

AM young and I wanted to see some history in the making. So I took myself through Canada. The geography of the Dominion changes more frequently than it is possible to issue special editions of the school-books for the latest threatened examinations. There is where I expected to find News being woven into History, and I found it.

You may read of the flight of Tamerlane and then bear in mind that a movement involving more people is on in Alberta Province; you may revel in those terse Scriptural chronicles of tribal movements, but do not overlook the fact that the flank of the Settler's Army bounds more people in the glorious valley and province of

Saskatchewan, than comprised many a nation of old, and the pages of Prescott, Parkman and the quill of Hough, may make the blood quiver with reminders of youth, but above Edmonton, just beyond the Last Frontier, in the vicinity of the Peace River, the horsemen, the ox-team, and the pioneer, are initiating history in the same sense that the French and Jesuit missionaries made it in an earlier day. But in that generation the soldiers followed to do the work that the missionary-explorers could not do; today the railroad promoter and the young college men with their tape-lines are dogging the footsteps of the pioneer population, which pushes west and northward more rapidly than the mills of Carnegie can provide the rails for