William Brown - Andrew Jackson

The difficult and dangerous work of keeping order and of enforcing business obligations fell largely to the "solicitor;" and one need not wonder that there was no great scramble for the office, so that a very young man, with no experience at the bar and little knowledge of law, got the appointment. His duties were simple enough, but he had no reason to complain of being left in idleness. The court records of the period show a picturesque assortment of assaults, street-fights, pistollings, gougings, and the like. Men who took such methods to adjust their differences were not apt to show any great respect to a prosecutor aged twenty-one. The majesty of the law had need of a vigorous rather than a learned representative; and the representative had need of other weapons than those supplied by the law books if he meant to make his authority respected and yet keep a whole skin on his body. If he proved weak and timid, he was sure to be despised; if determined and relentless, he was sure to make enemies; if incautious and unwary, he would probably get himself shot. It is doubtful, however, if any better man than young Jackson could have been found for the place, and that is almost the same thing as saying that no better place could have been found for him. To the office and his new surroundings he brought the qualities they supremely demanded, – a will that no man ever subdued, a desperate courage which not even the Tennesseans could match, and a swift, intuitive perception of the way to act in emergencies.

According to all accounts, he was successful from the first in his trying work, and his success in that brought him other work as a lawyer and a rapid rise to prominence in the community. He became well acquainted, for his work required much travelling about. He learned the country itself. On his long journeys he was frequently in danger from the Indians, and learned their ways and how to cope with them. Sometimes he slept alone in the woods, or even lay all night awake, his hand on his rifle. Once his readiness and nerve alone saved himself and a party of travellers from surprise and massacre. Whether he dealt with Indians who beset his pathway through the wilderness, or white men who would not let the law take its course, it is not on record that he ever turned aside from his purpose. In ten years he was the possessor of a considerable estate, chiefly in land. And he had not accumulated property by neglecting his duties as solicitor. When certain intruders on Indian lands were giving trouble, Governor Blount said: "Let the district attorney, Mr. Jackson, be informed. He will be certain to do his duty, and the offenders will be punished."

But the district attorney did not escape the consequences of his firmness and courage. He had so many "difficulties" that even in that country he soon got a reputation for readiness to fight. A mass of anecdote and tradition about his early quarrels has come down to us. Some of these affairs seem to have been undignified and rather ludicrous scuffles: in one of them Jackson overcame a huge antagonist by poking him with the point – or, as Jackson himself pronounced it, the "pint" – of a fence rail. Other quarrels followed the dignified procedure of the duello. They were all subject to the condemnation which our gentler civilization pronounces on violence as a means of ending disputes, but no doubt they helped the young lawyer into the prominence he had won by the time Tennessee was ready to become a State.

The most important event of this early period of Jackson's life was his marriage. It was first solemnized early in 1791, and a second time in January, 1794. The second ceremony was due to the painful discovery that at the time of the first his wife was not fully released from a former marriage. She was Rachel, daughter of John Donelson, the pioneer, and when Jackson first came to Tennessee she was already married to one Lewis Robards. Robards was a jealous husband. He made charges against his wife concerning several men, and finally concerning Jackson, although the facts that have come down to us and the opinions of those who knew most about the affair all go to show that Jackson acted as a chivalrous protector of a distressed woman, and never knowingly committed any offence against his accuser's home. Robards and Rachel Donelson had been married in Kentucky, then a part of Virginia, and Virginia had no law of divorce. In 1790 the Virginia legislature, acting on a petition of Robards, authorized the supreme court of Kentucky to try the case and grant him a divorce if it should find his charges against his wife and Jackson to be true. Somehow, Jackson and Mrs. Robards were persuaded that this act of the Virginia legislature was itself a divorce, and so they were married. In 1793, however, Robards brought suit before the Kentucky court, and the court, finding on the facts as they then existed, when the accused couple were living together as man and wife, granted the decree. In order, therefore, to make sure of a legal marriage, Jackson had the ceremony repeated.

It was a most unfortunate situation for an honest man and an honest woman, and saddened a union which was otherwise pure and beautiful; for to the day of her death Jackson and his wife loved each other most tenderly. It brought into his life a new element of bitterness and passion. Whoever, by the slightest hint, referred to the irregularity of his marriage, became his mortal enemy. For such he kept his pistols always ready, and more than one incautious man found to his cost what it meant to breathe a word on that forbidden subject. One such man was no less a person than John Sevier, "the Commonwealth Builder," who struck such a good blow for American independence at the battle of King's Mountain in the revolutionary war, and who was Governor of Tennessee when the trouble with Jackson occurred.

The painful facts of his marriage, and the criticism of his wife, had another effect on Jackson which in time became important to the whole country. Through that experience his chivalrous feeling for women was developed into a quixotic readiness to be the champion of any woman whom he found distressed or slandered.

In 1796 Jackson took his seat as a member of the convention called to frame a constitution for the State of Tennessee. He thus entered on a brief career of public service, in the course of which he held three important offices. In the autumn of 1796 he was chosen to be Tennessee's first representative in Congress. A year later he was appointed United States Senator, and held the office until he resigned in April, 1798. From 1798 until 1804, he was a justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee.

These were all high places for so young a man, and one naturally expects his biographer to linger for many pages over his course while he held them. The fact that he held them is indeed important, for it shows how strongly he had established himself in Tennessee. But very little need be said of what he did while he held them. Indeed, it is amazing how little can be said.

In the convention he served on the committee to draft the constitution and took a somewhat prominent part in the debates, and there is also a tradition that he suggested the name of the State; but no notable feature of the constitution is clearly due to him. It might, however, have been due to the presence in the convention of such fiery spirits as he that it adopted a rule of order which throws into comical prominence the warlike character of early Tennesseans. Rule 8 declared: "He that digresseth from the subject to fall on the person of any member shall be suppressed by the Speaker."

The scant record of Jackson's services in the House of Representatives and in the Senate is of little importance to us save in three respects. It throws some light on his political opinions at that period; it gives us a glimpse of him as he appeared against the background of the most elegant society then existing in America, for Congress was sitting in Philadelphia, which had sixty-five thousand inhabitants; and it led to one or two friendships which had an important bearing on his later career.