Corsica" by Gregorovius, will agree with
me, that he who would know Napoleon
must begin by studying Corsica, which
has produced many Napoleons. And no
man will ever be able quite to compre-
hend Andrew Jackson who has not per-
sonally known a Scotch-Irishman. More
than he was any thing else, he was a
North-of-Irelander. A tenacious, pugna-
cious race; honest, yet capable of dissim-
ulation; often angry, but most prudent
when most furious; endowed by nature
with the gift of extracting from every
affair and every relation all the strife it
can be made to yield; at home and among
dependents, all tenderness and gener-
osity: to opponents, violent, ungenerous,
prone to believe the very worst of them;
a race that means to tell the truth, but,
when excited by anger or warped by
prejudice, incapable of either telling, or
remembering, or knowing the truth; not
taking kindly to culture, but able to
achieve wonderful things without it; a
strange blending of the best and the
worst qualities of two races. Jackson had
these traits in an exaggerated degree; as
Irish as though he were not Scotch; as
Scotch as though he were not Irish.

The circumstances of his childhood
nourished his peculiarities. He was a
poor boy in a new country, without a
father to teach him moderation, obedi-
ence, and self-control. The border war-
fare of the Revolution whirled him
hither and thither; made him fierce and
exacting; taught him self-reliance; accus-
tomed him to regard an opponent as a
foe. They who are not for us are against
us, and they who are against us are to be
put to death, was the Carolina doctrine
during the later years of the war. The
early loss of his elder brother, his own
hard lot in the Camden prison, the
terrible and needless sufferings of his
younger brother, the sad but heroic
death of his mother, were events not cal-
culated to give the softer traits the mas-
tery within him. All the influences of his
early years tended to develop a very posi-
tive cast of character, to make him self-
helpful, decisive, indifferent to danger,
impatient of contradition, and disposed
to follow up a quarrel to the death. Not
to be of his party was to be a traitor, and
death was too good for traitors.

His first step in life shows something
of the quality of the man. His father, his
forefathers, his relatives in Carolina, had
all walked the lowlier paths of life, and
aspired to no other. This poor, gaunt,
and sickly orphan places himself at once
upon the direct road to the higher
spheres. He gets a little money by teach-
ing school, mounts his horse, and rides
away to the North to find a chance to
study law. He accomplishes his purpose
with playful ease. After two years of the
most boisterous jollity, the tradition of
which is fresh in Salisbury to this day, he
has won his license to practice, and goes
off, penniless, to regions unknown. He
lingers a year in the old settlements; long
enough to discover that there is no room
there for a lad of his mettle.

Westward, ho! Half a dozen young
lawyers go with him to the valley of the
Cumberland, but he has contrived to get
an appointment as prosecuting solicitor,
an office supposed to be worse than
valueless; but he made it invaluable. He
becomes at once a man of mark in the
new country. The little settlement ex-
isted in a state of siege, liable to attack
at every moment by day and night.
Every clump of trees, every thicket of
cane, every field of corn, might conceal a
foe. Every mile of every journey had its
own peculiar peril. The solicitor, half
the year on horseback, compelled to
make long and solitary journeys, lived in
an atmosphere of danger, and became

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