Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SOLDIERING WITH JACKSON, 1813-1818. INTO this regiment, says Mr. Parton, describing the junction with General Jackson, in February, 1814, of the thirty-ninth regiment of United States infantry, six hundred strong, ? into this regiment one Sam Houston had recently enlisted as a private soldier, and made his way to the rank of ensign, ? the same Sam Houston who was afterward President of Texas, and Senator of the United States. Of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) the reader will hear enough. Born on the ragged border of North Carolina on the 15th of March, 1767, orphaned by the Revolution, emigrating to Tennessee in 1788, and an United States representative and senator from the new State at thirty, ? resigning his senator- ship, forced once more to serve the public as Judge of the Supreme Court in Tennessee, and retiring again to private life in 1804, when only thirty-seven, ? he was the extreme type of Americanism. He was so like every American, only more savagely intense, that his popularity could not but have been great under any circumstances. Notwithstanding his fine characterization of his friend Patten Anderson as
the naturalenemy of scoundrels, it is hard not to call Andrew Jackson a scoundrel. One must have read Mr. Par- ton’s account of Jackson’s early life in order to appreciate the completeness of the squalour of this western civilization. Horse -whippings and murderous duels were an ordinary affair with Andrew Jackson; and yet he was the legitimate leader of the community as its best member. He was destined to tickle the vanity of Americans as never man before, by closing the disastrous War of 1812
in a blaze of glory, to become the most popular American of the century succeeding Washington, and to make himself forever memorable by organizing t…