e prison-fever, and
to be buried in a grave which her son was never able to discover.

Young Jackson, sobered by this and other experiences, applied himself
with some diligence to his books, taught school for a time, studied law,
and at the age of twenty was admitted to the bar, for which the standard
was by no means high. To the west, the new state of Tennessee was in
process of organization--an unpeopled wilderness for the most part--and
early in the year 1788, Jackson secured the appointment as public
prosecutor in the new state. It is not probable he had much competition,
for the position was one calling for desperate courage, as well as for
endurance to withstand the privations of back-woods life, and the
pecuniary reward was small. In the fall of 1788, he proceeded to
Nashville with a wagon train which came within an ace of being
annihilated by Indians before it reached its destination.

Jackson found his new position exactly suited to his peculiar genius.
His personal recklessness made him the terror of criminals; he possessed
the precise qualifications for success before backwoods juries and for
personal popularity among the rough people who were his clients, with
whom usually might was right. At the end of three or four years, he
practically monopolized the law business of the district; and he soon
became by far the most popular man in it, despite a hot-headed
disposition which made him many enemies, which involved him in
numberless quarrels, and which resulted in his fighting at least one
duel, in which he killed his opponent and was himself dangerously
wounded.

It was inevitable, of course, that he should enter politics, and equally
inevitable that he should be successful there. Eight years after his
arrival from Carolina, at the age of twenty-nine, he was elected to
represent his state in Congress, and covered the eight hundred miles to
Philadelphia on horseback. From the House, he was appointed to serve in
the Senate, resigned from it to accept an election as Judge of the
Supreme Court of Tennessee, was chosen major-general of the Tennessee
militia, and so began that military career which was to have a
remarkable culmination.

On the 25th of June, 1812, apprised of the outbreak of the second war
with England, Jackson offered to the President his own services and
those of the twenty-five hundred militia men of his district.
The offer was at once accepted, and Jackson, getting his troops
together, proce